Need help with concept- space-time manipulation

1. Yes, I think almost any idea can be made fun enough for a game.
2. Most likely. You will probably want to develop at least one of the puzzles you talked about.
3. Yes. I think you are looking toward the stars. Most projects rarely get out of their infancy. Unless you have a solid group of people working with you, I would scale the game down. Unless you have an artist or a means to get all the models and art, you should plan on making it much more simple.
The best advice I can give it to just get started. After a week, 2 weeks, or a month, see how far you've gotten and determine what can and needs to be done next.

I'd say stay simple as the above poster said.

As for the idea it needs to be expanded. The best way to do that is to build up a plot. For instance, you could make it so that humans tested controlling time and opened rifts. You could be pulled in and led on an adventure to get back, this would allow diverse levels. You simply use some kind of radar and you find the next rift that you have to go into. On the way you could meet people and things, traveling from one rift to the next.

Simple idea that allows for an easy plot and something to build a game around.

This seems pretty cool. Like, you occasionally need to slow time to manage certain levels and navigate around lots of slo-mo bullets. Allows the game to switch between twitch and tactical.

It allows levels to include anything from history. Rifts allow dinosaurs or raiders from various times to escape into your time. Perhaps some of them must be kept alive and returned with a memory erasure to prevent changing a key element of the past that your civilization relies on. Or perhaps someone changes something in the past and your mission is to arrive before them and stop them from it (kinda reminds me of the terminator series).

Being the concept designer (not artist) for the project, I've been puzzled on how to implement this into the game. My idea was to have some kind of 'lightning gun' that phased enemies out of existence if held for, say, 3 seconds, as well as the forcefield cannon and controlling the flow of time. Also, should we simplify the Barrier Cannon to a Claymore-like forcefield device, or keep it the way it was described?

Quote:

1. Is this a good idea enough to be implemented into a game?

Sure. There's a few FPS games out that have a similar emphasis (Half-Life 2's gravity gun, Portal's portals for example; I'm a bit out of touch on the more modern FPS games so I'm not sure on the details). I think it makes a good basis for a decent FPS game with a heavy dose of puzzles.

Quote:

2. Do I need to develop the idea more?

Most definitely yes. The description of puzzles where you "manipulate the surroundings with the weapons, achieving a certain goal" is way too vague to be useful. For this idea to work you will need to specify exactly what the weapons are and what they do in order to figure out the technical requirements and the nature of the puzzles.

Quote:

3. Anything that you have to say about it.

The biggest problem with this kind of game idea is that it almost certainly requires a lot of technical expertise, especially if your manipulation weapons are novel in any way. There's a good chance that whatever idea you have would be totally incompatible with the algorithms and data structures that represent the game world. These sort of idea can work really well if you are or have on your team a talented engine designer who can figure out a great new way to build the internals of the engine to incorporate some new gameplay element, but if you don't have such a engine designer then there's a good chance you'll get stuck when it comes to figuring out how to implement the code architecture.