WhiteFangofWar said:
More OT: Castlevania done Dark Souls-style, where you aren't a Belmont or someone similarly blessed (which I feel makes it less apparent just how strong most Castlevania monsters are despite most of the games being quite tough), but an ordinary human hunting vampires and other creatures of chaos summoned by the castle's presence. Imagine the number of ghosts there that could help you out.
You know, now that you mention Castlevania, I had this kind of odd but I think still pretty good idea for something involving the monsters and other creatures of the Castlevania games. While it didn't necessarily have to actually be part of the Castlevania IP, I was thinking of something along those lines that's part 3D Action RPG and part castle/town management. The overarching premise is that you're a vampire/vampire hunter/whatever that is trying to build and maintain a Castlevania style castle, town, and forest, and the overall goal is to get all the various supernatural creatures from Castlevania plus humans/mages/hybrids/etc. to live peacefully together, while still being about keeping them as threatening and awesome looking as monsters should be.
Here's what I'm thinking, each creature would be assigned one or more innate natures that have to be managed, such as "aggressive towards X" and an intelligence level that would control how easy it is to actually get them to do what you want and the distance away. For instance, with "Fully Sentient" creatures that are "Aggressive Towards Humans", as long as you fulfill their needs properly they won't attack humans without any further input on your part. However, with "Pure Instinct" creatures that are "Aggressive Towards Humans" you have to both fulfill their needs and place the lair as far away from humans as you can manage, while keeping them and humans as far away from each other as possible. Other creatures can only be corralled or hunted rather than directly controlled, but can be used as a source of resources and/or training for the creatures that can be. Then, there would be aptitudes assigned to each creature that would determine how good and fast they are at a given task that would make sense for that creature. i.e. due to their ability to climb most obstacles and on walls and ceilings plus their webbing, Giant Spiders are very good for expanding your castle and constructing other buildings, but also due to their large size and natural aggressiveness towards any creatures that have blood, they have difficulty working alongside most other creatures if their needs aren't being fulfilled to near maximum. Some creatures would even be able to make resources themselves that other creatures could make use of, such as the Giant Spiders producing dozens of eggs daily that aren't allowed to hatch which most other creatures can eat, and Spider Silk being useable at least in part in rope and clothes.
As for the action RPG portion, that would involve your character, as the leader of the community especially early on, personally running around procedurally generated dungeons, the Castle Town, Forests, and so on doing various tasks, such as hunting down creatures to recruit either through diplomacy, force, or through stealing the young, fighting off Monster hunters and self proclaimed "Dark Lords" encroaching on your territory, dealing with criminals and insurrections in your own ranks, and so forth. As an RPG would be something akin to the Monster Hunter games in general gameplay, with exp levels akin to the Metroidvania games. Later on you'd be able to delegate a good amount of these sorts of missions to your resident creatures to deal with.
I hope that whole thing doesn't sound nuts.
