Serefan wrote
In short, the first thing it's going to be is a complete remake of IVAN using Java, since that's the programming language I can handle the best.
The main purpose, but it's still just an idea, is making IVAN multiplayer.
That's what I was going off of. Not "a multiplayer game based on the IVAN universe" or "a multiplayer game inspired by IVAN" but instead "multiplayer IVAN." That implies that the mechanics are going to remain largely intact to give us the IVAN experience we all know and love/hate (in a very bipolar sense for some) except with our buddy getting gang-raped alongside us. Now if time and difficulty scaling were not factors, I think that a multiplayer roguehack-a-like would have a damn fine chance, but these two aspects are core concepts to the IVAN experience and how the game plays. Thus, in the purest sense, "IVAN
multiplayer" would be an extremely frustrating experience.
Now if the idea here was to make a "fan" game based around IVAN but with different principles and such, that's just fine and I wish Serefan the best in his struggles. There are plenty of ways to approach it that could yield some fun results, but none of them would really capture the IVAN experience. Still, fun is fun and if you manage to make a fun game then more power to you! I'd personally like to see an IVAN 2D fighting game with all of the characters we know and love, each with crazy-stupid combos and one very special fighter called "The Player" who is ridiculously weak but has a dog to help him. I also think the idea of an MMO interpretation of IVAN could yield fantastic results once you get past the initial leap to a real-time engine. Levels that don't currently have players on them would be randomly re-generated and the equipment/monsters would be spawned in as soon as someone joined, then beefed up for more players or toned down for less. I'd also like to see this idea evolve with benefits for helping each other out, such as flanking ability and combat boosts when you've got other players around you to encourage folks to stick together.
In conclusion, multiplayer IVAN doesn't really have a chance in hell unless you gut it of all the aspects that give it a unique feel and replace them with a more basic and simplified structure that lends itself well to multiplayer. It may sound like a good idea at first, but looking into the matter with any amount of scrutiny reveals the flaws behind it. I don't even want to go into drinking from fountains, how cheap deaths of one player will ruin the multiplayer experience for the other, or how the scaling could be horribly abused in the same sense of Double Dragon II (the engine spawns more items and brings the difficulty up to accommodate more players and one of them just snatches up all the gear and kills the other one for a "better start").