I have recently noticed that releasing public information about your games progress can be a motivating factor for the programmer. People such as ACWraith and Tiberath have done such a thing and received decent feedback. I guess I can see how showing your games progress could make people anticipate your games release as they already know what to expect due to your open development. I tend to believe close development would work much better for me, but I'll give this open development a shoot.

As of lately, I have been experimenting with several game ideas that I have floating around in my head. One idea I had was quite similar to Ragdoll Masters, which of course uses ragdoll physics. So after reading countless tutorials and enlightening pages, I failed to correctly recreate these physics. But there is no doubt in mind that I will combat to this idea at a later date.


Ragdoll Masters

I then watched several brutal videos of the indie game, Toribash. I then wondered what this game would be like if it was real-time. Obviously I can not create such a work of art right now, so I thought of a basic idea which is somewhat similar to it.


Toribash


Concept

As you can clearly see, this picture displays the joints and bands. Once the game starts the "doll" will be facing you, his left hand will be holding a shield about the size of two hands while his right hand will be holding either a sword or a spiked ball. If you would like to walk, then you must drag each leg to the desired location. For those who have played Ragdoll Kung Fu, manually having to move the legs in that game is what I am trying to achieve.

I never intended the "doll's" to have air combat (as seen in dragonball z) or be able to jump. Though, after replaying the game play over and over in my head, I realized that this may be a necessity. Just walking back and forth attacking objects/dolls will get quite boring after some time. Since it would be hard to incorporate jumping and having to move each arm fast enough before you hit the ground, I may add a slow-mo feature. Perhaps every time you jump the game will slow down. Since this game will not be tile based, I should be able to use tick_lag to my advantage and still pull of nice looking attacks.


Now the fighting system will need to be excellent if I want to keep a player's attention. I am still writing down ideas but the only thing I have down that may be solid is having players drag their "doll's" sword wielding arm towards the enemy attempting to hit them. Then the player can drag their "doll's" shield wielding arm trying to block a counter attack.


What I am trying to avoid

Now I can imagine this would be a very slow paced combat game and nothing similar to Toribash. Of course, I would have several different types of weapons, but the weapons mean nothing if the game sucks. So what do you recommend I should do with combat? I really want to avoid using the keyboard at all cost, unless it is necessary.