4D shooter?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

I’ve had a fantasy for a while to write a 4D shooter - it would have the usual WASD controls, but two keys, say ZX, would move you in the fourth dimension. The game would of course only render a 3D slice of the 4D level.

Level design would be a challenge, I think the levels would have to be built procedurally as it would just make a human brain bleed.

You would be able to walk into an empty room and then translate in the fourth dimension to encounter some creatures. Or get shot out of nowhere. You could have a button to flip the axes being rendered…

#2

Hmm… I think I don’t quite understand what you mean or at least can not imagine an example.

The first thing I thought of with the description of 4D shooter with controllable 4th dimension was controlling time - either standing still or walking while pressing those 4D buttons would change the surroundings faster: everything gets rotten or gets fresh again, depending on direction ;D

#3

Imagine it as controlling the lights (fourth axis/dimension) in the world and depending on the brightness you see different stuff while everything just moves on without even noticing the brightness changes. The level wouldn’t react to brightness changes but it would react to you appearing and dissapearing when you change the brightness aka where in the fourth dimension you are located. This wouldn’t be real 4d but close, because the player can only see 3d at a certian point on the 4th axis at one time.

#4

Sounds fun…so how long till you’re done :wink:

#5

So… basically Miegakure but as a shooter?

This sounds like a pretty interesting idea, but also as if it could be really hard to get a proper game from…
Maybe something like chose what/whom you encounter or something…

#6

4-dimensions to a 3-dimensional game would be like FEZ’s 3-dimensions are to its 2-dimensional gameplay.

I’ve toyed with the idea too, and what I keep coming back to is the FEZ solution, that is, to have the “extra” axis rotate in steps, so as not to have to render all the possible intermediate states.

To follow up the FEZ example, in that game the third axis rotates in 90º increments, which results in 4 different 2-dimensional versions of the map to play with (the top and bottom faces of the level are ignored).

If the axis could be moved to an arbitrary position, it would result in a virtually infinite number of versions of the map to move about, which would make gameplay design unmanageable, and possibly extremely confusing.

My guess is that in a 3-d/4-d game, you’d have a larger number of 3-d versions of the map to visit when rotating, and the trick would be to have entities (for example, enemies) moving about in a way that makes sense regarding the “face” of the hypercube they’re still on.

I love 4-dimensional geometry and its weirdness. Hope you get somewhere interesting with your project.

#7

What? This is a project already? It was a more of a pipedream-class idea.

But I have started writing a simple n-dimensional maze generator. A simple first step to the full madness of nDFPS would be a little maze explorer.

#8

Of course it’s a project! If you don’t someone will…

someone… :persecutioncomplex:

#9

Well, pipedraming is the first step… Ok, and the only step for a lot of people (introspection enabled ::))

My personal 4D pipedream was more about a puzzle-exploration game, sort of like Portal or Antichamber.