Game Concept and such

This will be where I will be posting game concepts for E347 as well as blog entries for www.gamezombie.tv on whatever games happen to be featured as well as whatever the hot items are.

My game is not about a space helicopter, that's just an inside joke between a couple friends of mine and I couldn't think up anything good for a name that wasn't my actual name.

I have a broad amount of experience, I've programmed in about 4 or 5 different low endish languages (C#, VB, Java, Scheme, JavaScript), have worked with flash and one other visual media program that I can't remember right now. I have improvisational experience as well, mostly in comedy, but I imagine that still spans most spectrum's. I've worked with garage band for about 4 months but have no real artistic abilities. I've been in a handful of other game design classes so I'm not new to how inner workings might lay out.

As for the idea. I've been kicking around this thought in the back of my head since we were told to come up with an educational game. When I was in elementary school there was this computer game that we were sometimes allowed to play. It was a survival of the fittest kind of game involving the food chain. It was 2d and involved squares and limited movement. Basically you'd pick what animal you wanted to be, from field mouse to (I don't remember) and then you'd have to find as much food as possible and get it back to a certain location without getting eaten. Anything that was above you in the food chain could eat you. To even out the very highest of this food chain, a hunter was introduced (non playable) that would kill everything equally. I remember the step below this was bear, but I'm not entirely sure you could play him. Depending on what animal you got, altered how far you could move in the map(s), and what kind of food you had to get. It could even have been that you couldn't play carnivores at all, it's a little fuzzy. (This was over a decade ago after all and for only a short time even then). I have no idea what the game was called but I'd like to make a remake of something like that.

~Ryan