Giant Mechs Tiny Neuron Pilots
Hello! Here's a small post to let you all know that I'm still alive and kicking, I'm just turbo burnt out and it's hard to think. I've also realized that I want to stop writing such long posts because they're both longer than I enjoy reading and longer than I enjoy writing, so this is also me trying to kill that brainworm.
So instead I'm going to share a silly low stakes brainworm with you. This morning I was thinking about how the scale of living things affects their perception of time. A tiny fly flies around at top speed and their brains are so itty bitty that they can process shit at incredibly fast speeds compared to humans given there's not as much to process. To them, we gargantuan humans move like molasses. Made me think about those fight scenes between gigantic skyscraper-sized mechs that are moving in slow motion with huge amounts of inertia and force between their actions.
That made me think about Titanfall. I fucking loved Titanfall 2. The premise of alternating between being a little guy who moves super fast to deal small damage and being a huge lumbering mech with slower movement but massive damage output is great. But we could make it even better (worse) by exaggerating their scale! And removing their guns because projectile weapons aren't as cool or interesting at these scales. Fists or swords or bust.
Make the mechs the size of skyscrapers. They move like molasses now. The pilots stay pilot sized, but we give them even MORE fast traversal mechanics. Ziplines, bounce pads, double jumping, wall running, chain air dashing... every "it feels good to move fast" type mechanic out there to cover large distances quickly, because now piloting your mech is done entirely mechanically by running across the surface of your colossal mech.
Mechs are controlled by pulling levers to power "muscles", configuring the target rotations of their joints by pulling ropes and attaching them to control cleats. Pilots rarely interact directly because they're usually like a kilometer apart, but I guess they could jump across to the other mech when they get close enough to connect to each other to try and sabotage the other mech's inputs.
I guess what I'm thinking of is kinda like Regular Human Basketball but first person, 3D, and I can play out the Mata Nui VS Makuta fight scene at the end of Bionicle. Anyways, there's my fast little video game idea. At the moment, the idea of making games fills me with dread but I promise I will never make this one so if someone else wants to, they can be my guest. I will play it for a whole 30 minutes at least.
