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.
Like Minecraft, but actually good. Minecraft is very successful for being a construction simulator with some easy fighting to keep kids busy, but something greater is needed.
My idea includes no hunger, no tool destruction, no violent camera snaps whenever you get damaged, less fall damage, a completely different inventory system that makes no need for in-world chests or item dropping or inventory management whatsoever (similar to creative building except players are limited to building with what they have gathered as well as a limited ability to exchange and gift items), and an emphasis on exploration (faster movement speed by default with a helpful player map that could be shared Civ-style with other people), and for the love of god better (and often extremely difficult) PvE.
Minecraft has very little going for it when it comes to PvE and exploration. My thoughts have dwelled upon things like more world-generated structures and structure-ridden biomes with a great variety of difficulties and mobs with different pathfinding and fighting strats, with the inclusion of an especially punishing and difficult biome that is overrun with automatons and robots that are immune to potion effects (with the end-game boss fight being in a regenerating massive building with falling debris and other environmental hazards that are otherwise very rare mechanics). There also isn't any fun way to explore the world aside from using elytra (which is bourgeois and many vanilla servers disable them for lag reasons) or using horses (which can't be used to pass rivers or forests or the Nether or End without major world-wide infrastructure projects). There should at least be something that allows for super hopping power, and other wacky things. I also want pre-generated teleportation portals around the world (somewhere within every few square kilometers) so that people can be incentivized to congregate around certain areas and survive in a much more dangerous world together. (Portal access would be determined with player map exploration).
My exact sandboxy-inventory ideas are a bit too much to go into. Essentially, I still haven't figured out how to keep death punishing without making it a grind. I don't want any post-death rituals of re-procuring things again. Perhaps implement some nemesis system like in Shadow of Mordor so there would be a random unusually overpowered mob roaming about? Maybe respawning is punishment enough due to how much of the game is running around to far places?
Minecraft struggles with having appropriate difficulty for many things besides PvE. The entire food mechanic is very easy to satisfy indefinitely no matter the difficulty, so it could just fuck off. Various farms satisfy most material needs to the point that the only community challenges people have on a decently active vanilla server are those who want to start some kind of organized crime operation out of boredom.
wow sorry for writing a book lol
this kinda sounds like 3d terraria ngl. would be cool if there was a graceful way of getting around the trivialization of content due to character scaling.
I never played terraria before and it does seem up my alley, but it looks like the inventory by default is very limited with quite a few grindy parts/encouraging the use of afk farms. I'm of the mind that afk'ing to mine bitcoin shouldn't be part of any game, especially not by design.
yeah, the grind in terraria and the fact that progression is mostly vertical (and so is essentially the same until the next patch) burns me out after 1 playthrough generally. you should check out starbound as well for ideas, imo it does weapons and decoration waaaay better than terraria.
Write away. Whenever I play games I tend to think about what I would do differently or better. Minecraft is a game where that really stands out. I've been saying there should be a Minecraft 2 already.
Like the game is about building shit yet building can be so tedious. You have to build scaffolding to build anything tall. You have to remove so many useless blocks to make space or clear out caves. All by hand. One of the things I want is a proper tech tree where you can create autominers. You would draw out an area for excavation and the bots would do the rest. You could make them some sort of clockwork or steam powered machines to keep with the medieval motif.
Defense should also be automated. Which I understand you can now build arrow turrets using dispensers and stuff. But the game should have had turrets in it long ago. And more things like golems where you can set their patrol routes.
Since the game is about building stuff, there should be way more block variation. Instead of having to half-ass building details out of fences and trap doors, you should have proper items and decorations for buildings. You should have proper roof blocks that are sloped. You should have proper windows with shutters. Doors with frames. Trims. Different versions of wood blocks like paneling, carved wood, etc. There should be proper furniture. All of this is perfectly possibly from an art standpoint. The only reason I can think of as to why they haven't done it is limitations set by the original code. MS has already reprogrammed the original game into C++ but I think the way the world is generated and handles objects, it's not possible to do some of these things. But modular building pieces and all aren't new nor technologically impossible. You could even integrate rounded objects like logs and trees and columns. But there should be way more variety and detail in building items. You don't have to have a unique recipe for every single item either.
The biomes and nature generation should be updated too. I appreciate MS adding in new stuff like the caves update. But honestly that shit is so elementary it should have already happened years ago. I think it's time to subdivide the world as well. Blocks should be smaller so there's more detail. There's plenty of games out right using smaller voxels and they look great.
So yeah, i agree. Minecraft needs to be revamped and redesigned to be better at its strengths and to get rid of its weaknesses.
I believe a large part of the lack of building items problem lies in inventory limitations. Having 10 different types of sloping dark oak planks would be really great for building and creative, but it would be a war crime to hassle with the current inventory system.
I was thinking of an inventory system that deals with raw materials, and automatically crafts certain items within an unlocked crafting tree (which essentially allows for making everything that you've gotten the resources for). Instead of crafting individual sloping slab types and trims and whatnot, a player could select a trim or item to place through a creative menu and it would automatically expend whatever resources go into that craft, and digging it up doesn't give you the trim and instead gives back whatever wood was used for that item. With such a system there wouldn't be room for things like Silk Touch, but it wouldn't matter if every single block in the game was craftable. It really is tragic that players have the need to put buttons on blocks for extra build depth.
I'm somewhat skeptical of the uses for automation, especially with how it scales for low-powered computers and servers (which is a part of why I wanted automatons to be the big baddies lol). Concerning basic common materials, I think the world should be rewarding enough by exploring and slashing away. Since there wouldn't be an inventory cap problem, there shouldn't be a reason for something like a spider to drop only 3 strings. I also think periodically replenishing loot chests could solve many procurement problems (so there is a reliable supply of certain items, and so there would be a reason to go back to places that have been raided before, and the really good chests could be valuable info to share, and there would be that much more of a reason to go out and try to find the best loot dungeons). The cycle for replenishment would have to be fairly long (and probably semi-randomly determined) so it wouldn't be gamed as much.
Concering Minecraft though, Mojang has been adamant about how there won't be a Minecraft 2. Everything is going into their main game, for better or worse. That's why something different from someone else would be necessary to have a more fleshed-out game.
That's a good point about the inventory. I was thinking too, i tend to focus a lot on building stuff when I play. Having a blueprints feature like factorio would be nice. I hate building a complex thing and then having to keep doing it over and over. It would be nice to build your own prefabs and then be able to place them in the world if you have the materials for it.
I would find it funny if someone littered the world with their copy/pasted dirt hut in the most random places one could imagine