I'm building a portfolio so I can try to get a job doing environment art. I have a little bit of an idea how the art-end of game dev works. However I can't help but to think about what games I would make if I was a project director or lead designer. What are your game ideas? They can be as unrealistic or realistic as you like. Big or small.

Mine:

I want to do an immersive sim with retro graphics and homage Deus Ex, Systemshock, and even VTMB (in terms of atmosphere). A grungy cyberpunk game where it's night all the time. I want to bring in TrueAnon type conspiracy stuff to replace the more reactionary elements of DE. Large semi-open world environments set in various locations. The PNW or NoCal for rural forested areas inhabited by militias. Suburban areas with a retrofuturistic 90s vibe. Large high-tech dirty cities. The good gameplay qualites of Deus Ex but updated and with QoL improvements. Though I would probably get rid of the squeenix quest marker and hand-holdy stuff. Make the player have to talk to NPCs and look around to figure things out. I would keep the graphical fidelity comparable, but ramp up the size and amount of stuff in the game. Environments would be full of vignettes and minigames. Make it so that not playing the story is rewarding and fulfilling too.

Another one is a spiritual sequel to San Andreas. Set it in CA, NV, OR, and WA. Set in the mid 90s instead of early 90s. A single open-world. Absolute tons of mini games and side-shit to do. Bring in skateboarding and the real BMX gameplay that never made it into SA. Improve the gang recruitment and territory system. Create real factions between the police, gangs, and feds. Increase dating mechanics. Tons of weapons. More B&E mini-games. Drug selling sim that you can actually scale up and make a business out of. Probably simulate some kind of economy in the game. Deep character customization. Tons of vehicles. Heists. Casinos. Casino management. Street racing. Car customization. Improved tagging. Just tons of content. Again, I would keep the graphics roughly the same, just include more stuff.

I need a city sim/logistics sim game but set in world with a centrally planned economy. The city sim stuff would focus on urbanization and good city planning. The logistics stuff would supplement that and lend restrictions to what you can or can't do. Like cash would in a traditional city sim. Not only would you be responsible for your sims and their city, but you need to create and operate supply lines as well. Like a mix of Factorio, Skylines, and Railway Empire. I have more specific ideas on how this would work, but I've already wrote enough for one post.

  • Poison_Ivy [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    You're all gonna clown on me, but I'd like a Fallout spiritual reboot the way that Bioshock Infinite was for Bioshock 1, think Fallout New Vegas style but set in the LA Basin from The Valley all the way to Anaheim. Instead of 1950s aesthetics itd be late 70s early 80s aesthetics.

    Instead of a nuclear wasteland, have it be biological contamination wasteland where the consequences of climate change led the US into ecofascism and trying to "bioengineer" their ecosystems back into normal with a combo of technologies (basically this technology identifies what ecosystem should go where by local flora and fauna and encourages it into regrowing back while cutting away invasive species to the best it can) that is too little too late and leads to societal collapse from a mass plague, crop failures, resource shortages and civil strife.

    So the human population as a result receives a massive culling, but all this bio-tech just keeps on chugging and does its job and repairs all these broken-ass ecosytems to a shadow of what they used to be and is still in the process of doing so. Because of Los Angeles' history of basically paving over and importing in exotic plant and animal species (we have wild peacocks and macaws here ffs) the biotech turns the LA Basin into a really unmanageable patchwork of mismatched ecosystems artificially sustained but richer in resources than other areas where the tech worked as intended, but much more dangerous because much of this tech has been neglected for decades and has been producing plants and animals hostile to human life or actively sees humans as detrimental to its goal of revitalizing ecosytems.
    This brings in the people that over generations and isolation have begun to form the gaspings of organized settlements and structures with differing cultures and politics.

    However despite resources being more plentiful than other regions, there is severe disagreement between all these people on how to best organize and who should be in charge and you're basically a background arbitrator for who and what gets to influence everyone else. These factions can be anything from small independent city states (imagine the descendants of rich assholes squatting in the ruins of a automized bougie shopping plaza in Hollywood like The Grove) to loose confederations of raiders with trappings of ideology, and each with smaller mini-cliques within them that can effect the trajectory of those factions into different directions that may make them amenable to other factions or less so. End goal is to basically to be a participant in a larger conflict that will flare up with or without you, but that you can make meaningful impact by participating and encouraging participation of others in the story.

    The factions are less X = Lib Faction, Y = Comrades, but more like scraps of people that if you uplift and support in different capacities can come together and form a society that creates differing ideological trappings of a society depending on who and what.

    DLC would be like Catalina Island, San Diego/Tijuana and San Francisco, with themes of imperialism/colonialism, border disputes, and defense against hostile nations as major themes respectively (San Francisco is basically a sunless and mineral-covered hellscape caused by terraforming technology and was home and birthplace of the ecofascist movement in-lore).