If you were to actually start working on a game concept, what would your big idea be? What kind of game would you most want to make?
Transgender simulator where all you do is eat hot chip and lie and persuade people on socialism
try Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. combines city builder with a production chain game
it would be such a short game though!!
year 1: communism is established
year 10: utopia
I'd joke that you could play a feudalism simulator but honestly all the medieval builders are also neoliberal.
A city/civilization management game thats not focused on pure expansion, war and economics shit but instead focused on the growth and development of your civilizations culture, norms and religion based on your environment and events in the game.
Instead of just developing religion and building monuments for the sake of pure game mechanics, explore why your civilization would be drawn to certain rites and beliefs, and how they would honor those beliefs.
Mostly inspired by the fact that I struggle to play Civ games in any way that isnt just "Oh I'll grab a reasonable chunk of land and then just chill out and make the best country for my fellas".
actually theoretically going to make this at some point. Only have a very early tech demo I made from a few years ago of an icosphere globe with distortable terrain that runs a triangle-based game of life on the surface, so I'll let you know when it's done in 20-40 years
That sounds pretty cool. I quite like doing something similar in Rimworld with the ideology dlc where you can have custom ideologies that can evolve over time. The 'bonuses' and debuffs via memes and precepts sounds sorta like what you are saying; have belief systems and so on exist for reasons not just because.
I actually intend to make a game kind of like this someday. That's a ways off, though.
Basically imagining a "build your own god" game in the style of Dominions, except instead of a game of pure war and conquest, it's a city builder where you use your chosen god abilities to develop your civilization (like a god of wisdom boosting research, or a fire god being able to burn brush to clear farmland). War mechanics, if included at all, will be purely defensive and the goal will be to reach a certain level of quality of life for your city.
A game where you play as a bird with realistic flight mechanics and in-depth controls. I just want to be a sparrow and stunt on some bluejays. Maybe an owl
Microsoft Bird Simulator 2022
a robin hood game
fun and sleek archery mechanics as well as a shadow of mordor esque ability to build your band
AC: Odyssey, albeit on the wrong side of the Mediterranean Sea.
yes but imagine if it didn't suck and didn't have some weird illuminati story
I'd love to make a CoD-style propaganda game that's all about short snippets in the lives of communist soldiers throughout history - maybe start with a cool-ass tachanka section for the Russian Civil War, then a WW2 partisan section, maybe you're a Vietnamese solider liberating Cambodia, etc.
cursed mashup of Crusader Kings dynasty sim / Mount and Blade overworld / Total War battle sim
or the rpg squad management / real-time world map / auto-battler encounter mechanics from Ogre Battle March of the Black Queen, but procedurally generated rather than linear campaigns
An anarchist commune moves into a haunted house, which takes a liking to them and tries to grow / rearrange corridors to help them. You play as the haunted house.
Can part of the gameplay be growing your commune to include vampires/ghosts/ghouls and other spooky beings?
Something like Warren Spector's "one city block" idea - an RPG (or immersive sim) set in a single city block, simulated with incredible depth and detail. I'm not wedded to the idea of a city block specifically - it could be a bit smaller scale, or a bit larger, it could be a village instead of a block, but the important thing is the approach of depth and density of content over breadth - massive open worlds with little to do (except generic, samey tasks) just don't interest me that much. Give me a small world that's full of cool details to find and many ways to get to them instead.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided isn't quite there yet (one of the elements of Spector's idea is really deep simulation of NPC behaviours outside of combat, and few games outside of dedicated life sims really do much with that), but it was still really cool - some people didn't like it being set in a single city instead of having multiple hubs across the globe like the previous games, but I really loved Prague, and spent so long exploring random apartments and little nooks and crannies that I basically forgot the main plot even existed.
a Hitman-style game set in a massive hotel complex during a Davos-style event, where you have to take out a bunch of political and financial elites, but you get to tackle the assassinations in whatever order you wish :sicko-yes:
How does it compare to Human Revolution? I really liked that game but haven't played any other Deus Ex.
In terms of gameplay, it's pretty good. Improves on some stuff from HR, has a bunch of new augments for you to play around with, a few new mechanics. There's now a crafting system, which... feels kind of like it's just there because apparently all games now need to have crafting. It can somewhat trivialize some stuff since you can get a ton of parts by disassembling everything you loot and then craft actually useful items, but I actually rather like being able to trivialize the hacking minigame by spamming multitools at least, since I hate it.
In terms of level design, it ranges from alright to amazing. There's a few more linear sequences that the main story takes you to which are merely alright, but the Prague hub is just :chefs-kiss: . There's so much stuff to do and find, so many apartments to break into, an awesome bank heist you can pull off, it's great.
The story's where the problems arise. It was clearly meant to be chapter 2 in a Jensen trilogy, and the plot just... ends at one point, in a manner so confusing and anti-climactic it makes you think your game must have bugged out and skipped a cutscene or something. And since the game didn't sell too well, there wasn't a next one (although now that Square Enix have sold off the rights maybe there will be), so there's just no resolution to the story. The plot also starts in a weird spot, with Adam having gone through a ton of stuff not actually covered in the game, but in... fucking tie-in novels of all things. The story during the actual game is mostly fine, but the whole "being augmented is like being an oppressed racial minority actually" theme just... really doesn't work, I don't know what they were thinking with that one.
So if you're more of a narrative-driven person, it might be disappointing, but if you're more about exploring and sneaking, you'll likely have a great time.
Oh I'm definitely an explore-and-sneak type of person. You've convinced me - I'll add this to my list!
If you want complex magic system where you create your own spells try Noita. It's a rogue like where you can mix and match spell components to create better magic. Nothing on the non-combat front though.
Yeah, it's just the closest thing I can think of to custom magic in a game.
I think Dungeon Master tried something like that back in the 80's. I ended up getting the SNES version but never figured it out because I didn't have the manual.
Kinda like Space Engineers makes building any sort of vehicle super complicated because it's all manual voxel placement and combination. It'd be neat to build a game with a fancy magic system though I don't know what you could do with the magic system without building an also complex single player magic user simulation type thing unless it's just a sandbox type game (at least to start).
Magicka taught me that magic isn't fun without the ability to disastrously fuck up.
I want to say one of the old Ultima games had something like this, where you had to "draw" multiple runes with your mouse to make the "sentence" that casts a spell.
Halo game where you play as the insurrectionist trying to free their colonies and Master Chief and his spartan groups are these massive boss battles that require careful planning, tech enhancements, and traps.
I actually read a few of the Halo books ages ago and I remember the beginning of the Harvest one had the marine hero dude do a cringe Jack Bauer on some terrorists or some shit. Honestly I remember thinking the whole book about how much I enjoyed the parts where it focused on the alien grunts who were getting completely screwed over by the higher ups instead of the actual marines.
I read Harvest too. I also remember the fall of reach book had their inagural mission assassinating the leader of an asteroid settlement. In hindsight it sucks ass
Playing Elden Ring and Ghostwire Tokyo back to back made me realize that more than anything I want more ways to interact with a games world.
Like, being able to interact with a world as gorgeous and vibrant as Elden Ring's mainly through violence feels like a waste. It seems trite but I actually felt that "if only we could talk to the monsters" sentiment from that infamous Doom review.
Ghostwire Tokyo is also a pretty game with a lot of attention to detail, but you can't touch anything.The game is set in a densely populated urban center but you can't enter in almost any building that doesn't have a quest attached to it. That sucks.
Basically my ideal game would be Stanley Parable: Raphael edition
edit: also an immersive sim set in an alien ecosystem. Think like Prey meets Rainworld with 10x the biodiversity. Honestly I'm waiting for more games to be inspired by Rainworld, that game is special
Genuinely would love this. The problem is of course that dialogue is much harder to do, because a player can fight the same AI 1000 times, but will never want to have the same conversation twice. You'd need a dialoguing AI before this becomes feasible for non-AAA shit - something like AI dungeon but hyper tuned, and preferably with highly limited input so that the player can't ask it to do their math homework or something else that would break the illusion.
I've often thought about this too.
I think there are 2 main reasons we don't see much of that:
- immersive simulation is HARD.
- there is something innate about combat-as-play. it used to really bother me how hard (though certainly not impossible) it is to think of cool game ideas that don't involve combat, and then I started to think about how basically every land animal that plays does play-fighting. Like, there seem to be a few major categories of play: racing, fighting, and for humans, simulation (e.g. the Sims, Farming Simulator, playing with dolls irl, etc). Part of the appeal of roleplay is that it allows us to go beyond that, but video games struggle to handle such a large space of possibilities.
Skyrim is the reigning king of intractable worlds, especially with mods. You can befriend animals, build houses, harvest crops, get married...
That's also one of the reasons The Witcher 3 remains my top game of all time. The world feels alive, and you can sit down and play cards or flirt or catch up with old friends or watch a play.
I tried rain world a while back but couldn't get past the controls. Is it worth another shot?
I'd say yes. All movement in the game is physics based, including the player, so there is a lot of awkwardness involved, but you eventually kind of get the hang of it. I'd also like to say that the game is hard, often in a kind of unfair way. IMO, not an issue of game design, more so a consequence of trying to make the player feel like prey. Basically there is a chance you might feel the game is not worth the effort, and that's fine.
I think it is worth it because there's nothing else like it. It really makes you feel like you returned to monke, and experimenting with how the different wildlife behaves is really cool. Also the lore is fucking bonkers and the pixel art is gorgeous.
Guess I just need to put time into figuring out how to play. Git gud, as they say. I had the same experience with elden ring at the beginning, figuring out how to work with the camera and game and thinking "how could anyone like this?" , and now I love soulsborne combat.
I just want something super simple: a truly co-op, simultaneous community game. Can be farming or whatever. I get so pissed that Animal Crossing gets close to this but just misses.
Essentially, I want to create one little town or whatever that all my friends can also participate in. I believe the original Animal Crossing allowed this but since it wasn't online you could only play one at a time. So like, we could create "Hexbearia" where you could have multiple people on at the same time. Everyone has their own house in the town, you could farm a plot of land, customize your house, whatever.
Even the newest version of Animal Crossing won't let you do this (I believe - haven't played it). It still fixes you to one local area. And you can visit your friends in their towns but you can't actually share a town and build something together. Literally that's all I want. But Nintendo just focuses on individualism I guess.
