I thought this one was a fun game idea, but I think the Splatoon comparisons would be unavoidable and destroy the game before it was even out. Also, I am super into bioluminescence in real life. It looks freaking amazing. It’s glow-in-the-dark but like... real! One of my earliest bugs to QA was that they spelled “bioluminescence” wrong. And the engineer closed it and said it wasn’t worth fixing.
Our game today is that it’s a competitive game, mostly shooter, where you’re fighting with different kinds of bioluminescence. You start in a completely dark room where you can’t see the walls or the floors or anything, it’s just black. But by painting the walls, you make them glow around the goop allowing you to make out walls and the floor. However! You’re now also betraying your position. An opponent can find your trail of color and use that to track you down in the arena. It’s a huge risk-reward system of knowing layouts versus making paths. You want to set up fake light trails and double back on yourself or run through some areas blind so there isn’t a complete unbroken line of light. You’d definitely need to have some kind of randomization in how the arenas are constructed so your more experienced players can’t just memorize all the layouts. So new arenas would be built more around a theme, like a haunted house where lightning flashes and lights up the whole arena for a second or an outside arena where rain storms float through and wash away light trails or one where the floor lights up from time to time but walls are always black or a bioluminescent tide where everything is dark if you’re standing still but then everything lights up around you as you run around. I think it would be fun and super stylish so marketing would be a lot of just showing people pictures of arenas mid-match and it would be super identifiable.
If you stand in your own light, you stay invisible to the enemy, shimmering Predator style. So you’re hidden enough that a quick glance as your opponent runs by doesn’t reveal you, but somebody really tracking you down would be able to find you. If you stand in your opponents’ light, you start to take damage after a second or two. The brighter the light, the more you start to burn. For contested areas with multiple kinds of light, you both shimmer and slowly burn, so it encourages you to not only paint your enemy directly but also paint over their light on the walls.
Different characters could have different spray patterns and intensities to their lights. Like a melee character that paints a small but super bright area versus a character that makes a big cloud of bioluminescence but it’s dim and weak unless multiple coats are laid down.
Mode-wise, you have your combat version where the goal is to just be the last one standing, but you could also have a less directly competitive one where you’re all dropped in a procedurally generated maze and the winner is the first person to find the exit but the map is built with crossover points where you can meet up and fight for a bit to slow your opponents down or just flee and continue searching for the exit.