I got this idea

I spent a good deal of time last night re-Learning Flash; one of the things I’ve always loved was that it’s vector based, so you do scaling with no loss of resolution. Everything is done with points and lines, not pixels. I’ve had a long-running idea of what I’d like to do if I had the time talent and cash.

I want to make a game.

I know, games are already made all the time in Flash, and it’s forefather, Director. I even made a couple myself in school. I know enough to be dangerous.

I want to do something along the lines of a superhero fighting game, and I want to have the ability to scale characters up and down in height. I’m not sure if I want to make it side-scrolling or Isometric with a 'board', or some way of running amok

Pretty articulate, eh? Well, I’ve played the Street Fighter series and all it’s incarnations, and I always wondered how characters would face off against someone with a vastly different size. In the Street fighter series, there’s a game of Street fighter versus Marvel characters and one of the playable characters is a Sentinel, a giant mutant-hunting robot. The big difference is that in the comics, these robots are 50-60 feet high, and in the game they’re about 12-15 feet. Still big, but not giant. They’re slightly bigger than characters like the Hulk and Juggernaut

I’ve also been introduced to games like City of Heroes and Freedom Force. Massively multiplayer online Games where you can do some serious copyright infringement and be a hero of your creation and go and fight evil. But again, no giants or tiny folk.

I have seen one game where there is a character who can change height and the two sizes offer different abilities. It’s called Godzilla: Save The Earth. THe web page is here. In this game it uses characters from the Godzilla franchise, one of whom is Jet Jaguar, an Ultraman ‘inspired’ character that starts out smaller and grows to giant height. When he’s smaller, he’s faster, and harder to hit with breath weapons and in hand-to-hand, but he does little damage. There’s an intro trailer - for fast connections just right-click here and save the link

It looks like a fun game, a kind of modern version of Rampage, only you can move around in a cityscape in 3d.

I was also inspired by a website that is now defunct; THE UNCANNY X-SPRITES. The creator of the site took sprites from the old Mega Man game, and modified them to look like X-men characters. I loved the humor, because he would always parody whatever story arc was going on in the comics. It hasn’t been updated in over a year, and I haven’t come across anything saying why. The URL is for sale now.

I would place a limit on height change, like a factor of 5 or 10, something that would keep out the kaiju. Even Godzilla, at his smallest was 50 meters, that’s over 200 feet. 60 feet is the original limit for the original Ultimate Giant MAn; there’s a team of them now in The Ultimates who are 180 feet, but the tactical advantage is unclear to me. That and

Sean McGuinness, aka Shin Goji, runs Twisted Kaiju Theater had a Q & A comic that covered this topic. The link is here.

This is all just a thought, I’m in no hurry to do this. I have a few ideas that sort of float around, waiting for the right time to germinate. William Carlos Williams had a poem about dreams being like seeds. I’m not sure much else about it, I read it in the 4th grade, and that’s all I remember is that dreams don’t have to die; they just need the right conditions to blossom.

Then again, in Doonesbury, Boopsie told Zonker, “Some old dreams need to die in order to make room for new ones.”