derail-the-train

I got a new awesome game idea, guys. (Prepare yourself, this is a long post.)

I'm calling it PsychoSphere, at least for now.
Usually this is where I'd give multiple games and/or movies that my idea's similar to... The only two games that come close to this are Portal and Bioshock though. Which is funny because they're nothing alike, and yet... They can converge into something like this.

The essential idea is that each level takes place inside a sterile, white, spherical room with platforms and walls all around. Room sizes vary from level to level.
Each room is a self-contained puzzle, where you have to get to the exit using your Environmental Time and Space Manipulator Glove.

The ETSMG has various unlockable powers, many of which are given to the player as the story progresses, but there are also extra powers that the player has to buy themselves at ETSMG upgrade stations.
The ETSMG's main two uses are combat and, well, manipulating the environment.

-Its manipulative powers are include things like shrinking down the whole room without affecting the walls, platforms, and any entities inside it, essentially pulling everything in the room closer together. Another power would be rotating the whole room while all entities (humans and robots) are suspended in the air. You could use this to suspend yourself and an enemy in the air while you rotate the room so that a fan is now right underneath them, and then you let go, you both drop back down, and the enemy gets chopped up in the fan.
My Manipulative power list is divided into two sections, Space/Time Manip and Elemental Manip.

The list so far is as such:
=Space/Time------
>Shrink: Make the whole room smaller.
>Squeeze: Pull everything in the room closer to a player-chosen gravitational center.
>Spin: Spin the room and its architectural elements, while all entities remain suspended in the air.
>Wrinkle: Wrinkle the space between two points, reducing the distance between them. Catching any objects or entities in the wrinkle will basically crush them.
>Gravity Well: Create small pockets of high gravity, drawing things to them, and making it hard for things to escape from them.
>Mirror: Mirror the contents of the sphere (including entities and the player) across a player-chosen axis.
>Time Bubble: Slow down everything in the sphere to a near crawl, leaving yourself in a bubble of time normality, allowing you to move around at normal speed.
>Lag: Cause all entities in the sphere (except the player) to lose a moment of time.  They'll seem to go stop cold for a moment, and when they come out of it, they'll experience strange sensations of confusion and deja vu, leaving them useless for some precious time.
>Time Slide: Create two small overlapping timelines, essentially creating two separate versions of everything in the sphere. The player can jump between the two timelines, interacting with two worlds and two different courses of events.
=Elemental------
>Static Charge: Charge the edges of the sphere with electricity, charging any electrical devices in contact with it, and delivering a shock to any entities in contact with it.
>Freeze: Drop the ambient temperature of the sphere, or freeze an entity. Ambient effects vary depending on how many times Freeze is used in one sphere.
>Burn: Raise the ambient temperature of the sphere, or burn an entity. Effects vary depending on how many times Burn is used in one sphere.
>EMP: Deliver a blast of electro-magnetic energy, shutting down any electrical machinery in the sphere. The blast can be directed into a smaller effect cone radius, in case player needs certain machinery to stay active.
>Flood: Fill the sphere with water. Each use adds about 1/8 of the sphere's volume worth of water.

-Its combat uses are for... Surprise! Combat. There are significantly fewer combat powers, mostly because most of the manipulative powers can be used for combat in roundabout ways. Also, many of the combat powers can also be used for puzzle-solving the same as manipulative powers.

The list of combat powers so far is this:
>Gravity Blast: Send out a small, directed blast of air, supercharged with powerful gravity. If it hits an entity, it will essentially cause small-scale implosion at the point of impact.
>Centrifuge Ray: A straight beam that causes whatever it hits to be pulled to the edges of the sphere.
>Updraft: Throw the target up into the air violently.
>Pressurize: Intensify the air pressure around the target, squeezing it painfully.
>Depressurize: Significantly lower the air pressure around the target, asphyxiating it (of course, this would not effect mechanical entities).
>Timekill: Speed through the target's biological timeline, forcing it to age heavily in mere moments.


So that's what I got so far.


-As for the story,
You play as a spy for a scientific facility, assigned to infiltrate a rival facility, and find out what their latest secret project is.
Everything goes better than you planned, when they wind up letting you test their secret project. That project is the Environmental Time and Space Manipulator Glove.
You're released into the Manipulator Glove Sphere Course, which is basically a series of spherical rooms (connected by tubes) based around puzzles to test the abilities of the ETSMG. The only real threats you face are various robots, designed as part of the tests. The test administrators give you helpful hints along the way, snack, drink, and whole-meal vending machines are available in the connecting tubes, and everything seems fine.
But as you dive deeper and deeper (literally: the spheres are arranged in the shape of a giant cylinder, that extends deep underground.), you begin to get hints that there's nothing waiting for you at the end of these tests. Writing on the walls, broken wall panels with blood on them, pieces of old Gloves.. You realize that the test administrators haven't communicated with you in a while. And then the worst discovery: A skeleton clutching a pad of paper. Crazed scribblings and writings on the paper tell of horrible things that happen... Beneath the Course.
Well, there's no way to go back now.
As you continue deeper, you begin encountering more and more broken down spheres, creepy discoveries and crazed past test-subjects, gone insane with the time and apparently obsessed with killing for killing's sake.
Then you reach the dead end: A sphere with no exit, completely empty except for an ETSMG Upgrade Station, and, more curiously, what appears to be all the main components of a house.
When you step into the center, however, the sphere starts moving. You don't know where it's  going or how, but you can feel the rumbles. Then the bottom drops out. You land in a dark underground cavern. The only light is coming from the sphere you just fell out of.
But you notice a light at the end of a tunnel. Following the light, you find another cavern, with another sphere. All of a sudden, a crazed man jumps out of the shadows and attacks you! This man seems to have his own ETSMG, and he's apparently bent on killing you.
But then a deep, wailing noise rings out through the caverns and the man runs away into the darkness.

You see what must be hundreds more lights flicker on in the distance...
This is an underground city of forgotten test subjects.
This is the real experiment.




-And that's the end. I think for the multiplayer I'd wanna have it set in the underground city, with you playing one of the past test subjects. You'd have your own customizable sphere, and you'd be able to unlock costume and sphere decoration pieces by winning matches and getting certain achievements and stuff.

So yeah. That's it.