What if the bullets cost money?

I have been thinking about old video games again. (See yesterday’s post — apparently this is a phase.)

The whole medium starts in roughly the same place. The very first thing anyone ever made that was a game on a screen was Spacewar! on the PDP-1 back in 1962 — two ships, a star with some gravity, and a handful of torpedoes. We have been making more or less that same thing ever since.

Everyone makes the space shooter

Pick up any game engine, open any “learn to make games” tutorial, and I will bet you a cartridge that the first or second project is a space shooter. Dodge the asteroids. Shoot the asteroids. The rocks break into smaller rocks. You get a high score. It is the “Hello, World” of game development, and for good reason — it touches movement, collision, spawning, score, and a win/lose state in about a hundred lines.

I have made that game. You have probably made that game. It is a perfectly good way to learn, but at the end you are left holding something that everyone else also has, and it does not actually say anything. You traced the drawing instead of drawing it.

What I keep coming back to is that the genre never questions its own free lunch. In Asteroids, the bullets are free. Infinite. You hold the button down and the universe comes apart for you at no cost. That is fine for an arcade machine whose whole job is to eat quarters in the lobby, not in the fiction. But it has always struck me as the least interesting possible answer to the most interesting question a game can ask, which is: what does this cost you?

The question I actually want to make a game about

So here is the seed, and I am writing it down mostly so I stop losing it:

What if the bullets cost money?

What if every shot drew down something finite. What if fuel was a resource you could genuinely run out of, alone, in the dark, a long way from home. What if the asteroids in your way were not a high-score machine but an economic problem — is this rock worth the fuel to reach it, worth the ammo to break it, worth the burn to haul the scrap back? Suddenly it stops being an arcade cabinet and turns into a little world with scarcity in it, and scarcity is where decisions live.

This is the same thing I keep banging on about with the console idea: creativity thrives in constraints. Free bullets are the absence of a constraint. Add a price tag and the whole design has to reorganize itself around the cost, and that is the part I want to go explore.

Disclaimer, same as always

I have not built this. I have built the tutorial version, like everyone, and then closed the laptop. This is a note-to-self disguised as a blog post: when I finally have the time and the right tools, the game I want to make is the one where shooting the asteroid is a choice you have to weigh, not a button you hold down.

Maybe I get to it next year. Maybe it takes ten. Either way, I know exactly what game I want to make.