Comedy doesn't scale well. Classic adventure games, like the
Space Quest series, demanded lots of content. Funny moments were funny because they were unusual, and they were unusual because the team created unique animations, sound effects and speech for them. As graphics and sound capabilities increased, so did the cost of creating that content.
Seeing the plush toys in Cartoon Commander would be funny the first time, but it would quickly get old. If you had the budget, you could create more content - hundreds of increasingly bizarre plush characters and ships - but then gameplay would suffer. One way that the Wing Commander games had good design was that they kept the set of enemy fighter classes small, unique and distinctive.
If you only have a few pieces of amusing content, you get
Armed and Dangerous. It probably looked funny on paper, but the actual gameplay was a standard shooter. Yes, some of the weapons were funny, but they were only funny once.
One of the worst things you can do is try to send up existing gameplay tropes. Unless you're really careful, you just end up repeating them. For example,
Evoland gets off to a good start, but in the late game you just wander between plot-critical locations while being hammered by random encounters. This has been annoying us for 25 years now, Evoland. Acknowledge the trope, then replace it with something different. As far as parodies of Wing Commander go, we already have
Wing 0 within System Schock.
The
Worms series did manage to make comedy part of the gameplay - or at least the 2D games in the series did. They made a good start by creating lots of content - the weapons and voices. However, the actual humor is emergent from its gameplay - the times you send three worms to their end in a single Prod, or try to use a Super Sheep and end up wiping out half your team and none of the enemy.
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw writes smarter than he speaks, and
here's what he said about quick-time events and the action sequences they inspire:
What I have found to be one of the most desirable qualities I look for in games these days is the water cooler factor - when everyone who's playing the game can get together around a water cooler or burning barrel and talk about the experiences they've had, and everyone can have a different story to tell. That is not a factor the game possesses if all of those stories are exactly the [deleted] same.
He was talking about action sequences, but I would apply it to humor too. If you talk to friends who played the same game, do you find that each of you did unique, hilarious things? Or did you all experience the same joke, at the same time?
Incidentally, Yahtzee also wrote about
comedy and the hazards of repetition. He seems to be less tolerant of Worms-style slapstick than I am.
So, could you make a Cartoon Commander where humor is emergent from the game mechanics? There are still many possibilities for games that could work. Here are a few that come to mind:
- Plush spaceships leak various types of stuffing when damaged. This may be collected for repair, blown around to create smokescreens, or ignited to cause damage. (Probably still a one-off joke).
- Rubber spaceships and projectiles deform and bounce off each other. To be worthwhile, this must be more than visual - so you intentionally crush a carrier's flight deck to destroy its parked fighters, or fire a missile at an asteroid so it bounces into the enemy without exposing yourself to enemy fire. (Possibly unfeasible even for modern physics models).
- Capital ships all have an exposed shield generator somewhere, but these generators are located in increasingly bizarre places, protected by elaborate Robinson Goldberg arrangements of interdependent defences and power sources.
- Everyone in your Privateer III game has a persistent personality, leading to opinions of you and of each other, which in turn lead to alliances and betrayals. If this feasible? Yes, Crusader Kings II does exactly that for the entirety of middle ages Europe. Is it funny? Yes, Crusader Kings II looks like a dead serious game, until you stop and realise that, for completely rational reasons, you have done horrible, horrible things to your entire family - and worse things to everyone you met.
There must be other ways to make a comedic space combat game - but the comedy should always start with the game mechanics. Once those work, consider polishing it with amusing dialog or cutscenes that reflect the mechanics.
