Let's Make a Game!!!!!!

Hey guys! Let's make a game!

First off, what sort of game will it be? Let's look at the market.

Things to rule out:
1) Deep, intelligent RPGs: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines failed miserably, despite its intelligent dialog and fairly deep character development system. So did Temple of Elemental Evil. In fact, we almost guarantee sales by not making our game a Troika game.

2) Any kind of real challenge: No one likes a hard game these days, because you can't beat a hard game in the time before you have to take your rented game back to Blockbuster.

3) Innovation: Sure, some experimentation is good here and there, but don't go all crazy. No one wants to be the next Molyneux.

4) Gamecube: I mean, c'mon. Like, three people own this system, and they're all using it to play Pokemon on their TV.

Using our heavily researched market data, I have decided that our game shall be an action game with "RPG elements." That means that you essentially run around breaking stuff, but you get some points that you can assign here and there that don't really affect the game too much. After all, we don't want anyone to bork their character. Also, you get to make some decisions when you're talking to people. Like this:

NPC: Hey, I have a quest for you. My thingy was taken by some guy, and I want you to get it back.

PC OPTION 1: Okay, sure! I'll get it back! Nice!
PC OPTION 2:I hate your face! I'll get it back, though!
PC OPTION 3: PIZZA!!!!

Our game will have tons of action. You will run around with machine guns and swords and grenades and energy swords and chainsaws and sniper rifles and rocket launchers and katanas. During the game you'll assign points to one or more of those weapons, thus making your character nearly imperceptibly better at them. You'll also collect trenchcoats and plate mail and lawnmowers for armor, and pizza boxes. Every enemy you kill will give up experience points, because we all know that the best way to learn about life and improve onesself is to kill lots and lots of goblins and stuff.

Our story will be epic. You are a young man named Hannibal Caine, born under a prophecy that you will be the one who either saves the world, destroys it, or just sorta sits around and doesn't affect the world in any overt way. At first you interact with your family and friends, randomly killing stuff that comes to attack you, when out of nowhere, your town is invaded and destroyed, and all you held dear is irradicated. YOU must take up arms (be they swords or nunchucks or sword-chucks) and get vengence for those dead people you hardly met in the beginning of the game.

Our market research found that players like all genres of games, and so our game will take place in an ancient past filled with dragons, cops, motorcycles, robots, zombies, King Vitaman cereal, more zombies, and Starbucks. Our research also found that gamers can't stand to do just one type of thing all the time, even if we COULD get that one thing to be super awesome and compelling, and so we need to toss in some minigames and side missions to "mix things up." In our game, the hero will have to help rebuild towns and cities after he wantonly destroys them, and he will do this by engaging in a Tetris-like minigame with falling bricks. Also, every now and then, we will remove all the cool weapons from our hero and make him sneak around in poorly developed stealth missions that suffer from an obvious lack of development attention.

The action will be intense, but since no one likes a hard game, we'll create difficulty settings:

Easy: Enemies die within ten seconds of entering the screen, whether the player hits them or not.
Medium: Enemies take three swings at the player, miss each time, and then run around flailing ineffectually until the player kills them himself.
Sorta Hard: Enemies do some damage to the player, but they then feel bad about it and set themselves on fire.
Hard: Enemies fight the player as normal, but they die off before they kill the player.
Master: Enemies dress up like good guys and talk in falsetto voices until they have the player fooled, and then they attack and die as in "Hard" above.
Hardcore: Enemies spawn right on top of the player, shove a bazooka up his ass, and pull the trigger, all before the player even loads the game the first time.

The last one is there to please hardcore gamers and game testers, who are convinced that a game isn't fun until one is on the verge of a heart attack from anger.

Oh, and there must be a twist: The bad guy you have to fight in the end... is you! Not only that, but there is another super-extra bad guy after that, and he is also you! And it turns out that you, the player, aren't even the player! But then you also turn out to be you!

And you get to sleep with chicks. Any chick you meet, you can sleep with her, but the screen cuts to black and just says, "SEX" in big letters. Because, you know, the children.

But still: HOT.

Cool, we're almost done. We just need a name. I wanted something like, "Katana Man," but our publisher wants something with "Dark" in it, or "Forces." So I propose:

Shadow Forces: Dark Master Evil Shadows of Darkness - the Abyss of the Undershadow's Dark Penumbra

Oh, lest I almost forget:

II

Because no one wants to buy the original in the series. Sequels sell, man. We'll release SF:DMESoD-tSotUDP Gold in a year and include the original in the package. We'll contract some poor fool to make it in Game Maker. Also, the original can double as the crappy GBA version, too.

Well, there you have it. We made a game, and it rocks. It's already sold 28 million copies, and not only that, but also porn stars want to sleep with all of us.

Good work, everyone. See you for the sequel.