Fog of War

I've decided to work with Jason and Emma on our game design project, and what we thought we'd do is all type up our individual thoughts on what direction we saw our design going before actually collaborating on the details. We have conversed about the general idea, but haven't really tried to draw out details.

Description
This, in its most basic form, will be a first person shooter (FPS). The setting we've tossed around most is WWII, simply because it allows for substantial flexibility in location and technology. That said, the main innovation is not in the setting, but the actually game play system (more on that later). This means that the game is not tied to one location or point in time so it is easily extensible based on creating new maps, character models, and weapons. Likewise, rules for movement and communication can be tweaked. Jet packs for World War 5? No radios running around during the Battle for Troy? For our purposes, here, we're only going to focus on the WWII aspect of this game.

The Players
The two concepts for players we have are: 1) nearly every sprite is controlled by a player and 2) different players may have different rolls based on the scale of encounter. For example, there is no need to have different roles in "Assault on French Farm". Simply, 5 Ally troops attempt to take a farm held by 5 Germans. Contrastingly, the Normandy Invasion would require battalions of people with a commander, artillery men, and methods of communicating what goals have been captured (more on rolls and communication below). People won't be used in tasks that require no choices. Reloading the tank gun? No one wants to do that, so that will be an NPC. Likewise with people loading artillery and screaming civilians.

New Innovation
One of the most unrealistic things about programs like Ventrilo (a voice conferencing program) or other "global" voice channels is that it completely unreasonable for the hidden spy to be yelling out directions to his forces while he is lurking in the shadows. Simply talking while hiding near someone will probably alert them and something like a radio was huge, bulky, and wasn't something you really carried covertly.

Our proposed system allows for several methods of voice communication: whisper, talk, yell, and radio. Of course, everyone (enemies too!) can hear any standard communication, they just have to be close enough. Radio use is reserved for commanders to talk to each other, however, it is possible for these radio signals to be jammed or intercepted (at the cost of substantial time/effort on the interceptor's part).

Various other communication methods can also be included. Hand signals can be hot keyed and agreed on prior to engaging an enemy to keep everyone quiet. Signal flares can be used to communicate over longer distances.

Single Player Campaign
This will also come with a single player mode that aims to teach the different roles possible in the multi player version. This will take the form of the player starting from a foot soldier who sees all of the basic tasks (footman, artillery, tank driver, etc) and moves up the chain of command to see some of the commander functions. Here, you can implement the hand signals discussed earlier along with some basic voice recognition commands (that is, to key commands to a particular word or number).