Stepmasters online

[Arch0wl]

I was thinking of something cool that SM could do if it ever went online, although this would NEVER happen, I just feel the need to log my idea
The scheme would be sort of like a 2d RPG, though which one I don't know. The out of game (character, land, etc) graphics could maybe be something like Breath of Fire 3 or Pokemon, though I'm unsure on how those would work out, and the ingame graphics would basically be SM. Anyways, you'd start out, make a character and all that. The world would sort of be a stadium, a lounge, a cafe(coffee shop style), a store, and another store. It would basically be like a HUGE GIGANTIC ENORMOUS theater or something.

You control your character, and you can go around challenging people to somewhere.
battle on a song. Whoever wins gets "tokens", the form of money in the game. You can use the tokens to outfit your character, or buy new songs, new difficulties for songs, or new song modifiers. New song mods, difficulties, and songs in general could be updated online. The clothes would be very vast, so customization freaks would be in heaven. Some items (extremely rare ones that require tons of hours to get) can expand the judge timing window by 1 ms when worn, so you could make the game significantly easier if you had 5 items that expand it by 1 ms giving you a huge advantage in timing. Some items can also give you special modifiers only while being worn. Some items would also let you play a special song, only while being worn. The items would range from vastly common to only one person or a few people on the game having them.

Items would cover 5 different areas:

1) Head
2) Body
3) Hands
4) Feet
5) Accessory

Each one would be viewable on your character.

The way ingame battling would work like DDR Ultramix. I don't know how that works, but if it worked for Ultramix it could work for this.

When you challenge someone, it pops up a yes/no box if you want to accept. If they do not accept within 30 seconds, it automatically cancels out. When you accept, you both have to decide on a difficulty, you cannot pick two different difficultys. If someone has a song/difficulty/modifier you do not, you can play it, but you cannot challenge anyone else with it. You can also have "item off" challenges, incase someone is a total noob and is only beating you because of his equipment.

You don't only have to duel, however. You can also have "winner takes all" matches with up to 32 people in one match. For every person it increases the amount of gold and EXP you make, however, it caps out at 250% gold/EXP so people don't only free for all.

As you win matches, you gain money. How much money is factored determined on how difficult the song is (1 foot would give the least whereas 14 foot would give the most), how many arrows the song has, how good you did, and the rank of who you're playing against. Playing against a player significantly lower in rank than you would make you lose a ton of gold if you lost (you do not lose EXP) whereas playing against a player significantly higher than you and winning would net you a ton of gold and EXP. Winning against someone a rank significantly lower than yours would hardly net you any gold and EXP, and losing to someone significantly higher than you would not make you lose much.

Your rank goes up as you win matches, you gain EXP and as you get EXP you rise in ranks. Your rank is displayed right next to your name. There would be 8 initial ranks you can get with EXP, and the rest would be based off of what top amount of players you are ranked with.

9: Top 100-51
10: Top 50-26
11: Top 25-11
12: Top 10-6
13: 5th
14: 4th
15: 3rd
16: 2nd
17: 1st

You can also have teams. Team battles are like regular battles except your entire teams performance is graded instead of just yours. Teams can have either huge gains or huge losses depending on how good your team is. There are also team rankings, which are the exact same as player rankings except a different graphic for your rank and it goes entirely by %.

Team rankings would go like this:

1: Everyone else
2: Top 75%
3: Top 50%
4: Top 25%
5: Top 10%
6: Top 5%
7: Top 2.5%
8: Top 1%
9: Top 0.5%
10: Top 0.1%
11: 5th
12: 4th
13: 3rd
14: 2nd
15: 1st

With mods, you can pick modifiers like speed mods, hidden, things that don't modify the actual arrows on your own without any trouble. If you pick a modifier that modifies the actual arrows like shuffle or quick, a yes/no box will come up, the person must agree to it, and it will affect both of you. You can also opt towhere both of you have the exact same mods.

The areas would work like this:

Lounge: This is the starting area. You can challenge people here or hang around and chat. The lounge area I'm thinking would be something like the FFTA guild area, except you could walk around in it and it'd be pretty damn big, because a lot of people would be playing. You can also form teams here.

Cafe: The cafe is where you buy clothing items to outfit your character. You can also hang here or challenge people. The cafe would be a lot bigger than the lounge because people would be here constantly.

Stadium: The stadium is HUGE. You can challenge people here, but if you pay a certain amount of tokens you can "perform", which gives people the ability to watch your arrows on a big screen in the center stage. Depending on how many people are watching and what your grade is and what the song is, you have a chance to get a rare item, song, or modifier.

Store 1: You can buy songs here, you cannot challenge people here, but you can however hang out and chat.

Store 2: You can buy modifiers and difficultys here, but you must have the song it goes with, otherwise you cannot buy it. You cannot challenge people here, but you can hang out and chat.

Each of the areas I'm talking about should be able to hold 500-1000 people at a time. And yes, there would be multiple servers which I forgot to mention in the first post, but I'm thinking of this with the idea that there wouldn't be 200,000 people or whatever. In the case of that, there would be more hangout/challenge areas I guess. There would probably be 4 of each area, and multiple servers.

Besides the standard areas, there are also rank-specific areas. You have to have the specified rank to get into them, however if you're a higher rank you can still go into them, BUT, you can only make challenges if you're the specified rank. The areas sort of expand, and you're restricted to how far you can go determined by rank.

Players rank #1-4 only: Village
Players rank #5-8 only: Castle
Players rank #9-17 only: Chamber of Legend

Teams ranked %100-50 only: Grassy Plains
Teams ranked %49-26 only: Ancient Forest
Teams ranked %25-11 only: Mountaintop
Teams ranked %10-6 only: Airship in the sky
Teams ranked %5-1 only: Spaceship in orbit
Teams ranked under 1%: Abandoned Space Station

Okay, yeah, this is my idea. I didn't put too much thought into it as I heavily doubt anyone would ever do anything remotely like this, but yeah, I thought of this idea and I didn't want it to be just some other cool idea I daydreamed and then forgot.

[87x]

wow.. thats a lot of thought.. but "stepmasters" isn't the best name for it.. i would rather call it.. Ragna-Gunbound-Mania... but thats just my own opinion

[vvolkov0073]

I love it

- Volkov

[heyhey11]

Wow you just made a whole new game

Copyright quick before the sims take it

[thebox]

I would never get off of that game if any actually followed through and programmed it.

[Nima]

good idea, but that'll take a while before that happens :P

[lightdarkness]

that is a great idea, but it wont happen for several reasons
noone wants to take the time to code it
a lot of people will think its stupid
too much money, little intrest, HOWEVER our entire ffr comunity will think its sweet, but ask around and stuff.... yeah

[IAMTHEEVILBEAN]

That is the best Idea ever......

seriously

www.gbadev.org

Many great coders there that can help (not all gba programmers)

[banditcom]

That's pretty sweet.

[makdaddy]

niice

[makaveli121212]

youre going to put tons of people on one server...no way, youd need multiple worlds, or multiple servers...lets face it most people dont have great computers and internet connections

[Musical_Master]

Good idea, except for the team battle thing. What would happen if you had an extrmemely stacked team lik Reach Arch0wl Privateer and Apeson. They would be unbeatable. There should be a way to upload your own simfiles to a challenge to, like in Tony Hawk Underground.

[Privateer]

Keep it simple: lobby, chat, list of people on, friends list like on battle.net, challenge anybody, winner is the winner.

As for ranking and stuff, just have bracket tournaments or something. No reason for making something complicated like that.

[djco2]

Originally Posted by Privateer

Keep it simple: lobby, chat, list of people on, friends list like on battle.net, challenge anybody, winner is the winner.

As for ranking and stuff, just have bracket tournaments or something. No reason for making something complicated like that.

lol...we can dream...lol

[jewpinthethird]

That is a really good idea. And a fun one at that. But playing with a pad would be so much more fun.

Sell your idea to konami. It's like T.H.U.G. but all DDR-like. Awesome.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by makaveli121212

youre going to put tons of people on one server...no way, youd need multiple worlds, or multiple servers...lets face it most people dont have great computers and internet connections

Each of the areas I'm talking about should be able to hold 500-1000 people at a time. And yes, there would be multiple servers which I forgot to mention in the first post, but I'm thinking of this with the idea that there wouldn't be 200,000 people or whatever. In the case of that, there would be more hangout/challenge areas I guess. There would probably be 4 of each lounges/cafes/stage/shop1/shop2 per server and about 8-12 servers in all.

But playing with a pad would be so much more fun

There's already DDR Ultramix. If you want to play online on a pad, go get that.

Good idea, except for the team battle thing. What would happen if you had an extrmemely stacked team lik Reach Arch0wl Privateer and Apeson. They would be unbeatable. There should be a way to upload your own simfiles to a challenge to, like in Tony Hawk Underground.

Teams are like that with every game.

As for uploading your simfiles, no. The simfiles would be premade by the best keyboard simfile artists, to maintain a certain level of quality to make sure all the arrows are fine and the song is not offsync in ANY way at all. The total song list I'm thinking would be around 120 songs or so, with about 30 rare ones, making 150 in all.

Keep it simple: lobby, chat, list of people on, friends list like on battle.net, challenge anybody, winner is the winner.

But that's boring. Do you know why so many people play Gunbound? Because of the items. If it was just shooting people, it would have maybe 1/8 of the current population playing. If survival project was just hitting people around and no cards, it would have a lot less people too. The idea of areas is a lot cooler because it's more of a interactive game.

As for sending my idea to Konami... err.... easier said than done. It's so hard to get into contact with Konami that you would just not believe. Even then, I doubt they would take it seriously. They'd think "DDR on the keyboard gwat deh fock mein?"

If anyone who has contacts with people who would want to make this happen, you'd need someone like synth who would be willing to run the game, some staff people, a ton of coders, stepfile makers (preferrably Cynic), artists willing to license their music, and some animaters/spriters willing to do the graphics. Like I said, it would have to be someone who could probably replicate one of the FFTA/Pokemon Sapphire|Ruby/Breath of Fire III style or someone who is really good with GFX. I'm thinking it would be in the FFTA style though as I'm assuming there's alot of sprite animaters who could do something like that.

[makaveli121212]

there could be different levels only accessible to certain ranks of people...but yeah there has to be multiple servers because lag would not be acceptable...forgot to mention before, good idea

[jewpinthethird]

So, basically sit is a Stepmania MMORPG? Correct?

And if you ever became series about it, I could help out on the art section.

[vvolkov0073]

What are you people waiting for....don't let this be another brilliant idea that just floats away because people think it's never going to happen...
There ARE the brilliant coders out there WILLING to give it a try...
There ARE people out there WILLING to do the art for the game...
There ARE a lot of people that are WILLING to help out in ways we wouldn't even imagine...
So let's keep trying out all we can and help chip in our own little bits...or something...

- Volkov

[Nima]

one cheap thing that people would do is they'd use two accounts and let one day and one win on songs like badger oni 42 foot :P or make high foot difficulty stepfiles and just gain cheap tokens which would ruin in the fun of it