I spent a lot of time as a kid in “The Pirate’s Den,” an unsavory arcade in the local mall. I’d play all the games at least once, but there were a few I gravitated to.

Some of those games that had a really unique and enjoyable feel to the players avatar as it moved through the world. They included Omega Race, Space Duel and Joust.

Though each of these games merits playing (Omega Race on the original hardware if possible), Joust is my focus tonight, because it explores a special niche, aerial melee combat.

There are a number of ways to think about aerial melee combat. Does a jump-kick count? No. That’s more in the falling-with-style category. Many flying games kill you and the enemy if you collide, so perhaps this is a nod to the melee attack, as one-shot-one-kill.

Almost all flying games that feature combat fall into the FPS or third-person shooter category (a sweeping statement..am I wrong?). That’s why I find the notion of the aerial melee game fascinating.

So let’s talk raptors.

It’s spring in Massachusetts, and that means the hawks are out in force.

The game I’m envisioning puts you in the role of a raptor, a hawk, or perhaps an eagle. Combat is a major part of the gameplay, but would be rounded out by racing and dexterity challenges (I’ll revisit these a bit later).

The first challenge is making the basic flying fun. A bird does not maneuver like an airplane, and the feel would be much different, the diving and swooping, the hovering, the gliding.

For the combat, I see two valid approaches:

The game is realistic, plays like Bushido Blade

In this model, the player is attacked by one or more targets, and accuracy and control are paramount, and a single well placed strike can put an opponent down.

Pros: Fairly accurate. In the few examples I’ve seen of these large birds in combat, they go at each other like missiles, there is a large explosion of feathers, and they either move on, or one goes down.

Cons: Too much like the one hit-one-kill model I mentioned above, and I don’t think the payoff is very big for the amount of time you need to spend finding and engaging your enemy in the open 3D arena.

The game is fantastic, the battles more extended

This is the direction I would lean. Help the player with navigation (similar to auto-aim). I see this as very important, as you would not get the kind of cues you get in flight-sims (altitude, horizon, other than visual confirmation, etc).

You want to feel powerful playing an Eagle. You don’t want to spend all your time trying to acquire a target for a brief attack, and then make a wide circle and try again.

To use the FPS example again, there are many first person shooters where you run around in great open spaces shooting people at range. There are very few where you run around in great open spaces primarily attacking melee. Rune is the only one that comes to mind, and they introduced ranged attacks as powerups. Most melee games constrict the play field to a small area (see almost any fighting game).

This is tricky to do with birds, what with the sky being so big, but you could confine the play area with canyons and tall buildings, or arbitrarily with out-of-bounds zones (which I hate). Best to combine the approaches, with natural features on three or four sides, and an arbitrary height exclusion.

The arena is small, but still quite a bit larger than a a boxing right or fighting game arena. The players have room to maneuver, but are kept close enough to ensure frequent encounters.

With some auto-aim help to make locking on to enemies easier, there needs to be some definition of the combat.

As I see it, you approach the other bird, and go into a “quick-draw ” mode like the gunslinger in Red Dead Revolver , where you get a brief slow-moment to pick a few target spots, the game resumes speed and resolves the attack. You should also have the option to take an evasive move, in hopes that you can quickly stage a new attack from a better angle.

This helps beef up the combat moment a bit, but I think I can do better.

Another combat option is the grapple, where you attempt to grab the other bird. Locked in a grapple, you both begin to plummet groundward, attacking with free talons and beaks as the world spins around you. This attack can persist for many seconds, with the only cue to altitude being the rising whistle of the wind as you plunge skyward. Forgive me, but here your hawk is playing a game of chicken; release and pull up too soon, and your prey escapes too. Wait too long, and you both auger in. Time it just right and you escape , but your foe does not.

So that’s the basic melee approach. This is the anchor of gameplay, but there are a few other things to consider. The flying has to be fun, and you need to be able to emulate the eagle-eye, highlighting small objects on the ground, increasing the field-of-view (I’m hoping with the wide open spaces this does not become an nausea issue).

Racing through urban and natural environments could be awesome, as you climb and dive, and bank and hover. The bird is much more maneuverable than a plane, and you could lay out some very interesting and crazy courses with tight turns, cul-de-sacs, and stop-and-starts.

I also see a series of agility based games. On a canoe trip, I once saw a group of a dozen-plus starlings playing a game of, essentially, football. The carrier had a piece of down in his beak, he would fly around, chased by all the other starling, flying around in circles over our canoe. Periodically, the carrier would drop the “ball,” which would float for a few moments before another starling snatched it, and repeated the cycle.

Games where you have to snatch a series of objects out of the air, drop objects onto targets, or skim the ground and grab items would add some variety to the game.

My time is up. Raptors are cool. Enough said. Did I forget to mention the regurgitating food into the mouths of your young mini-game? Damn. That’ll have to wait for another day.

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.