Developed in collaboration with Winterro completely spontaneously during an online session at like 5AM (but more on that later!)

Trouble seeing the Elephants? Good!

Elephants of the Mist is basically a SimplePlanes-based take on Manhunt, but instead of children on a playground, it's giant rolling pixel art and zoo animals with hammers!
Also, it's all in the foggy dark.

In a nutshell:

Two groups, Rollers and Animals.
The Animals want to smash all the Rollers, working as a team to do so.
The Rollers want to not get smashed, and be the last Roller alive by the end.
Like in Manhunt, should a Roller be destroyed (either via Animal or any other damage), they become an Animal themselves and join in smashing their former Roller comrades.

To add to the spookiness, however, there's a catch:
It's dark, the Rollers glow, and the Animals are painted dark.
The Rollers are easy to see, the Animals less so.
No radar is allowed.

What does these Rollers and Animals look like?
How do they work?

Rollers

The Original Roller, made by me six months ago, pictured in its post thumbnail.

Rollers are massive, 7.5m diameter pixel discs. They can reach around 150km/h forwards and backwards, however suffer from the nature of angular momentum: turn too quickly and it'll roll over... or at least try to, courtesy of the gyro keeping it upright and turning.

These things are fun to use, but have something of a learning curve. They're fast, nimble, but neither at the same time.

Because they're rough-edged, due to their block-based construction, they tend to bounce a lot while moving. This can result in deadly crashes (and so becoming an Animal), BUT also spreads out damage somewhat along their rim, so it's not all bad!

Be careful, they ain't all that durable!

Good thing is, because they're made of blocks they can be easily repainted to suit your fancy!

Here are some examples from SP2:

The original Graingy version.

A tasty chocolate chip cookie - using textures for added... texture!

A black hole, demonstrating the beauty of 500% glow! Fun fact: this one inspired this minigame concept!

What a lovely smile!

A... somewhat subpar attempt at a swirl. Looks like an out-of-date mint...

Oh, hey Boeing... I was gonna do a LunarEclipse one too, but these WPlace-inspired ones are annoying to get the RGB right, so I didn't get around to it. Maybe some other time?

The following aren't game-legal due to being too dark, but do further demonstrate the variety of designs possible.

Four Grains. Hey! That's me!

Starry night sky? Twisted and Evil cookie? Who knows!

These following two were created by someone going by Skylark_J during an earlier point in the session before this concept was created. They came back while I was writing this and gave permission for me to include these, as I was hoping to.

Kirby! This wasn't made for the mode, so the facial features aren't glowy, but it's still a pretty good impression of the little guy!

A really neat Sonic ball! Again, doesn't glow, but that's easy enough to fix.

Animals

Hard to see, exactly how it's supposed to be!
... Winterro, I'm gonna need you to get me a link for this thing.

Animals are walkers with blunt force instruments and a very bad attitude. This is Winterro's contribution, so I'm not so keen on the details as they are, but in essence these are low-visibility creatures with hammers - or potentially other weapons - dead-set on smashing Rollers to bits.

Now, the issue here is that Animals aren't yet complete. Currently only one variety exists, this elephant, and it's not been tuned for the mode. It's currently much too slow (~50km/h) to catch the much faster Rollers outside a miracle, so consider this section a Work-In-Progress.

Ideally, hopefully once Winterro has the time to develop this type further, Animals will use low-visibility matt paint (as the screenshotted one was modified to use) and potentially come in a variety of types, such as other animals with different performances (e.g. faster but weaker, slower but stronger, weaker but with weapons that hit easier, etc.), which I must admit I'm excited to see.

As-is, this elephant can slam its hammer down very quickly and do a lot of damage. The downside is that it's slow (as mentioned prior), and rather slippery on the controls - but in a different way to the Rollers!

Many details are still in the air, like if it'll get glowing eyes when attacking (thus discouraging random constant swinging), to a number of other things - particularly how they're balanced against the Rollers in mobility. Stay tuned!

The Setting

Simple. Midnight, heavy fog, ideally around an airport. While of course these rules can be changed for the purposes of the players, in basic form no player can leave a set area to avoid a Roller just running away and turning the game into Hide-and-Go-Seek.

Some Things Yet Determined

Obviously there are a number of unknowns here, many of which I've probably not even though of or have forgotten by the time I got to writing this section. I'll probably go back and edit this thing when I remember more, or if someone points something out.

No-Radar or Photo Mode?

To begin with, this game is honour-based; no other way to enforce otherwise, sadly. Anyways...

Just turning off targeting retains the rest of the HUD, such as speed and - more critically - a kill feed. It tells you who defeats who. This gives a more game-like sense of competition.

Alternatively, Alt+F9 hides EVERYTHING, including the kill feed. This also means players must eyeball their speed, adding to the spookiness and making it all feel a bit more powerless. It's just you and your vehicle, that's it. The downside is that the game-like sense of competition from a kill feed is lost.

Honestly either could work fine, it's just what is to be the "Standard" which is unclear.

Animal Balance

As mentioned prior, it's yet to be seen how the Animals will be balanced. How much slower than the Rollers will they be? How about acceleration? Turning? Rollers can wipe out and "stun" themselves by turning too fast, while Animals (or at least the Elephant) can't. How will this all play into balance?

Yeah, a lot to be seen to here. This will be tough.

What if an Animal is destroyed?

First post-posting addition!
If an Animal is destroyed, is that player out or do they respawn?
If the latter, it'd be straightforward: last Roller standing wins.
If it's the former, that would introduce another dimension where Animals themselves have to try to not knock each other out.
Which would be better? I've no idea. Food for thought.

Communication?

Is Chat allowed? Can rollers communicate? Animals? Are third party communication services (e.g. Discord) allowed? I’m tempted to say no to all (though definitely no to the latter, since not everyone has it/is able to use voice chat), but the Animals are supposed to work as a team, and stopping to type can make Roller more susceptible to being caught - an added challenge for them.
Worth discussing, methinks.

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In summary:

Cool new game idea!
Smash things!
Run like wild!
Draw dumb designs!
Some other thing!

WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

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One final thing: When?

This all needs to be tested. Issue is, the playtest ends in less than four days and Winterro and I use timezones like ten hours apart. That is... tricky. In any case, both of us find this concept intriguing.
If you're interested, let us know!