A friend and I have this small game we love called Shadows of Doubt where you’re a detective solving procedurally generated crimes in a procedurally generated world. I think the game’s pretty fun and very unique, but I also acknowledge that once you get a feel for how the game works then it starts to get pretty same-y as there’s not a large variety of ways to figure out what’s going on and there are quite a few ways to kinda cheat your way through some mysteries.
The idea we had was a procedurally generated detective game but set in a fantasy world. I’m talking trying to figure out who sent poisoned food offerings to the dragon lording over the area, taking down the local death cult sacrificing people to some god of chaos, tracking down dangerous wizards who broke out of jail right before being executed, and whatever other silly, absurd, or creative ideas they come up with for crimes to be committed or be solved in a high fantasy setting.
I think the game should have enough variety in the types of crimes to be solved that it shouldn’t really run into the issue of getting into a routine of how things work, but I also feel like this could be addressed by having it so if you start getting into a routine of mechanics you engage with then it starts nerfing those mechanics. Keep using mana sensing to find the people at the crime scene? New crime scenes will start to have more muddled mana so it’s harder to detect or isolate exact matches of people. Keep using eye witness testimonies? People start having trouble remembering exactly what they saw. Keep using company/government logs to track who could have been involved? They become less cooperative as time goes on as they start to think you’re leaking that info OR the next criminal heard you did that so they specifically damaged those logs so you can’t use them.
I can’t remember which game it is but I’m thinking in the same vein as that game which adapts to how the player disposes of enemies by identifying you’re doing a lot of head shots so giving enemies helmets, or body shots so body armor, etc.
A space strategy/tactics game with realistic physics. Basically ftl stops at the edge of a solar system, and then ships can reach a small percentage of c while traveling within the system. Lasers travel at c, but you have to anticipate where your enemy will be over long distances. Missiles or torpedoes are evn worse with the addition of worrying about fuel consumption to reach their target.
I think it would make for interesting dynamics. How would fighters/drone swarms work? Mines? Bases? How would ambushes work.
Farming ideas for your next dev project? 😜
If I was a dev the question would have to be changed to: “You’ve just won a competition and now a couple of mid-tier game developers have to listen to your game idea, because no other devs would take part. Be ready to compromise. Your vision is a starting point but be ready for it’s content, scope, theme and narrative to be modified heavily. What game do you make?” 🤣
3 words: Assassin’s Creed Discworld 😁
A porn one
No, I will not be taking questions
Remake Phantasy Star Online please.
Omikron : The Nomad Soul 2
I love how half of you took this as a challenge to see what would be the most expensive project to cause game studios into bankruptcy 😂
The idea of Star Citizen, but actually finished and without selling individual ships for real cash.
Torn between 2 game ideas:
a. It’s a game for Luanti. The premise is that the Earth 1000 years from now is a wasteland of robots and toxic waste, after humans abandoned it centuries beforehand. You are sent there to investigate the planet, but things go wrong and your ship crash lands shortly after you awaken from your cryo-sleep. You run through quests in order to try and survive and fix everything. But along the way you find these weird animal crests that give you different abilities. It would be a challenging game as resources are purposefully scarce, unless you fight off the deadly robots for scraps or the dangerous mutant animals for food.
b. This one is a combination of Sonic Riders 1 and the trick system of the Skate series; if they had a baby this would be it. Set in a world of anthro animals. The story mode would be split into 2 different stories following 2 different 3 person teams. Team one consists of real chill people: 2 men and a woman in their mid-20s. They’re missions would be centered around the trick system. The other team would consist of the leader of the other teams younger brother and his 2 teammates ( both women ). Younger brother is much more serious and consequently, his missions focus more on pure racing.
I already have a good idea for an ad for game b, too. So, the hover skateboard like things the people ride are called Steamboards ( since the first ones were steam powered ), just fir context. The ad starts with captain of team a riding his steam board across a desert like flat area. He ends up easily passing a driver in a red race kart wearing a red hat. Then he ends up stopping to quickly charge up his board, thinking out loud: “Wouldn’t want to be that slow.” Then a blue blur on what looks like a steamboard comes flying by. Captain shrugs at the camera and thinks out loud: “Can’t be faster than everyone.” Then hopes back onnhis board and the ad transitions to gameplay clips. All before showing the game title, in a very title screen way. Ad ends there.
History Is A Nightmare From Which I Am Trying To Awake: The James Joyce Experience.
An RPG that faithfully recreates the entirety of James Joyce’s oeuvre, starting with Dubliners, then Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, then Ulysses then Finnegan’s Wake.
Imagine the minigames - can you jerk off on the beach and climax at the same time as a one legged girl?
Can you get the married woman drunk enough so she jumps in front of a train after you rebuff her advances?
How many sex workers can Stephen visit with his monetary prize from the Jesuit school?
Gripping stuff.
A game where you feed and pet and take care of guinea pigs. Varieties of vegetables and reactive chin scritches and they yell at you with they notice you going about your business. Also my guinea pig has to be in it you have to ruffle his fur or you will instantly die.
Possibly a setting in the Andes, I dunno it would be funny to he a guinea pig herder. Otherwise it just has to be comically over designed and marketed as competing with Death Stranding.
Over-budget motion captured acting with Nicholas Cage. He’s a pig shepard named Armando Marìa-Castañeda. The publisher should go into debt and barely recover from all this.
A hybrid of sorts between a 3D platformer (honestly any type of action game would work for the overall point but I envisioned it as a platformer) and a life sim. You play as a highschooler with some sort of powers (who I’m imagining is “neutral” on the good-evil axis) going through their senior year. The platformer levels come in not through some greater adventure but through smaller, mostly disconnected ones, some done as for-hire work and some triggered by choices and events within the life sim portion. The game would be on a calendar system rather than any form of linear progression, ending with graduation.
To give an example of how the life sim and action segments might affect each other: let’s say there’s an optional mission where you’re hired to assassinate an influential politican. There’s a character in school who’s the daughter of this politician. If you don’t take the mission you can be friends with this character. If you take the mission and do it normally, she is aggressive toward you and later it triggers a level where you have to defend yourself against her army of airships and fight her at the end. But if you take the mission but do it stealthily, she’ll still be friends with you but be noticably depressed…and maybe there’s some scenario where she’d find out, and, feeling betrayed, it’d trigger a harder version of her boss fight.
Obviously there’d be other life sim elements like relationship trees with dialogue choices including romantic ones, and more things to do within school/town (one idea I had was being able to get a job delivering pizzas…or running drugs,) and likely some minigames.
You see why this is untenable, right?
Super Mario Bros Z the videogame.
I mean the original is already using M&L RPG series assets and the story is actually pretty fleshed out despite eventually getting cancelled.
I would love to see a grand sci-fi game that’s a mixture of Titanfall and mirror’s edge.
You would have open world runner sections where your entire job is to run messages between agents on a city/station that is working hard to steer the war… and then you go and do big stompy robots combined arms, titalfall-esque fighting, just open world instead of the (rather great) map, point-to-point of the original.
Alternatively, just give me either a single player or MMO implementation of The Allbright System.
Whatever I choose, I would just like the engine to be released under GPL, and the assets under CC-3.0-BY-NC-SA so that it lives on, regardless of however well it does.
