How silly is a Minecraft/Splatoon mash-up?

As my younger lad has been playing a lot of Splatoon lately, I recently got gripped with the urge to figure out how to do it in Unity.

So, that's what I did today.

But the way it works, it requires everything to be made of nice regular (and fairly high-poly) meshes (because under the hood, the paint is tracked via vertex coloring). This makes it a great technical fit for a Minecraft-style voxel world. So:

How crazy is a Minecraft + Splatoon mix?

On the surface, this seems like a pretty dumb idea. Splatoon is a fast-paced FPS. You're highly motivated to run around painting things, and you can't really be digging or building at the same time. On top of that, matches tend to be short, which simply doesn't give you time to do much digging/building.

Of course we could add other game modes (capture-the-flag, death-match, etc.) that might change the pace a bit. I guess I could imagine maybe somebody digging tunnels into enemy territory, so they can pop up behind enemy lines, or building walls to help defend their flag, particularly if things were rebalanced so matches last 10 or 15 minutes rather than 2-3.

Still seems like an ill fit to me, but what do you all think of it?

 

Which means somewhere underneath, there is probably something really cool.

The game I'm working on right now, for example, is a combination of AdVenture Capitalist and Outpost Kaloki. The core idea is that instead of your businesses generating money directly, they generate inventory, which has to be purchased by customers. And to make these two things work together, I jump in the middle and spread some secret sauce around, because at first blush they don't fit at all.

But it's fun figuring out where the secret sauce goes and how it can make things work.

 

Yeah, no.

It seems like the mechanic of painting surfaces would be at odds with the mechanic of destroying surfaces.

 

Perhaps the paint pops the block when you get enough coverage on the exposed surfaces, so you're painting to mine. Which could be interesting, since you could use the paint to create temporary hiding places or dig traps. Might be interesting to play with.

 

What about minecraft-style creation and destruction, but only on the voxels that have been secured (via painting) by your team?

 

Oh, man!

Now we're talking!

Yeah, make it so that boxes get claimed and effect what you can and can't do with them.

Can I change my vote now?

 

If you slow down the frenetic gameplay of splatoon, either by increasing match by time, reducing the speed that you "paint" or regenerate "paint ammo", or all of the above, I could see how modifying the world with voxel blocks could create interesting gameplay. Plus kids love it right now, thanks to splatoon and minecraft being tremendous hits, so show a couple screenshots and players instantly know exactly how to play, what the basic mechanics should work like.

 

could always put painting and building/destroying into one mechanic, which is, you build blocks with paint and if it's another players color, it would destroy it. Could make for an interesting fast paced game mechanic tbh

 

What fascinates me is that we have come up with at least a half dozen different ways this can be done, right here in this thread, and if everybody went off and made their own idea they might all be "Splatoon meets Minecraft" but they would also all be entirely different games that were fun in their own ways.

 

I'll drop a link to the "master minecraft" thread, which covers how to do a lot of the work to get a voxel engine running nice:

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/after-playing-minecraft.63149/

 

I think it's a terrific idea to make bases then splat them for territory, power ups and so on. you could have a corrosive splat that will slowly erode blocks, healing splats, there's a lot of great potential here for a superb game.

I'm not interested in making it. But, great mash up potential.

 

Hmm, yeah, you could do it as having two modes — an "online" and an "offline" mode. A lot of games I enjoy work like this; in between games you build/paint your models (Warhammer) or assemble your deck (MTG) while plotting and scheming about the actual battles. And then you get together with friends who have been doing the same thing, and mass chaos ensues.

So, yeah, I guess you could build your base not during a battle but between battles, with some sort of constraints on it so everybody doesn't have a base that's a solid block of unobtanium; and then for a battle, your base and their base are plopped down with some random terrain in between, and you go at it. Ooh, and maybe take-aways from the battle (earned credits or materials) allow you to improve your base for the next time.

I like the idea of the paint slowly eroding away the enemy base. And of course, if your bricks are being eroded, then your paint would shore them up again.

Hmm.

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone!

 

Okay, nothing really to do with Minecraft or Splatoon here, but I've been thinking about the issue of "you can't really be digging or building at the same time."

Imagine a little pocket puzzle cube, like this.

​

Now imagine that it is constantly rotating and there is no way to traverse a corner. So you're on one half of one face, and the other team is on the other half, and if you're on the wrong half when they disconnect you are cut off from your team and the other side dogpiles you. Then there's a period of time where you can't interact with the other side.

This isn't just an arbitrary rule, it's enforced by the environment. So long as your potential connection points cover less than half of the space, both sides have to spend some amount of time cut off from one another.

Anyway, it's an interesting mechanic that I thought might be fun to consider.