In my Critical Game Study course we had a design challenge where we had to take a Triple A game and make so you can play as the villain. I decided to use Halo 3 and make it so two players could play against each other with one person being the Gravemind and playing a real time strategy style vs another player who was playing a first person shooter style similar to how the game already is. Project E is an evolved version of this concept but as it’s own game.
In this document I will be talking about a lot of the Flood from the Halo Franchise and will be using some of the more specific terms especially when talking about specific units. If you want to know more about what units these names are referring to I would use this link:
Setting & Info: You would be playing the Gravemind through a good amount of the Halo 3 campaign and story as you spend your time throwing your floodlings at the Master chief and UNSC to try and stop them and take them over and stop them from getting to the Halo and activating it to kill you off.
Mission: This game play style would be swapped over to and RTS style where you have a sort of 3d top down view of the levels and maps and are able to send in the flood units at points of the level and set up to try and kill the Master Chief and Arbiter who you could still have being played as other players to give the game a more asynchronous gameplay where it is player vs environment vs player. The player as the gravemind would be sending down flood units and controlling them to attack the master chief and other players in a pvp environment of players in FPS mode vs player in RTS mode while at the same time the Gravemind player can use their units to attack the ai controlled UNSC units to get more units.
Difficulty: With the game being asymmetrical where it is players playing as the good guys in an FPS format vs a player playing in the RTS format trying to stop the FPS player the difficulty would be a weird scaling style where as the difficulty is harder for one player it is easier for the opposite side of the fight. If the FPS player wants an easier time playing the game is harder for the RTS player where they would have less units to use and the units he does have would have less health and less damage, the reverse is also true. If the FPS player wants to have a harder time then the RTS player would have more units to use and the units would have more health and more damage.
Skill Set:
The Gravemind would be able to have a set number of units mainly consisting of a “recharging battery” of Infection form flood units
The infection form units would be able to take over dead bodies of the AI controlled UNSC marines and other AI units to add units to your pool of active units. These units would not be able to be redeployed to other parts of the map.
The Gravemind would have a set number of other units ranging from Pure Forms to Carrier forms with the number of units depending on the stage and difficulty the players are playing on.
On death of any of the actual players on the other side of the map the Gravemind would get access to additional units that are higher value such as pure forms.