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.
The last one is Workers and resources: Soviet Republic.
I had RPG game ideas but Disco Elysium has outflanked my brain by like 15 years and I'm still trying to process it.
The cryptid one sounds really cool, but then I remember that data mining is a thing and every secret that the developers try to hide in the code would be sussed out instantaneously when a patch went live. Still worth doing though because most players would try not to get spoiled.
That cryptid one sounds so good I'm surprised it's not a thing. When I was younger and PC games came in giant ass boxes, I played one of the hunting sims and liked it. You could even riff off those old bass fishing sim games and do water cryptids too. The novelty would probably carry it a bit with streamers who like doing jumpscare horror games. You could even do seasonal hunts for Santa Claus, the easter bunny, etc but give them a more spooky vibe.
I've been dreaming of making a game with gameplay based on the MSX Metal Gear games that's essentially a soviet flip on spy action games/movies. You'd be a GRU agent infiltrating a US missile base, and the general of the base would go rogue and threaten to nuke Moscow and you would have to stop him with the help of an unlikely American defector/romantic interest. It starts with a long trek through the wilderness to get to the base from the border, simple stealth stuff as you evade patrols of local guards and play around with simple survival mechanics. Then you get to the base and overhear the extremely racist conversations being had between the American troops as you sneak past them. You would encounter "freakshow" bosses similar to Metal Gear, and their backstory would be that they were created in MK-Ultra experiments. One of the boss fights would happen after your character has been exposed to copious amounts of LSD, and you would have a vision of being in a shootout across the roofs of the Twin Towers while he talks about the real power of the US being that it's the world reserve currency. Then you get betrayed by a member of your support team, the nukes are launched and the base goes on alert, and it's a big action sequence to fight your way to the control room to hit the abort button before they detonate. Naturally you succeed and save the world, though Stanislov Petrov ends up getting credit for it because the Soviet government doesn't acknowledge that your unit even exists.
Oh and the City Sim/Logistics Sim game you want to play is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. 100% planned economy and sim management, build your infrastructure up enough and you can become completely self-sufficient.
I like a game where you effectively have a career and level up into new types of gameplay.
One idea I had is where you start as an intern for local government all your superiors are insane, incompetent, drunks or drug addicts making crazy demands. It kind of a city builder sim but plays like Papers Please and the politics aspect of CK2. You get things done by doing favours, you have various conditions for failure like the city goes to shit, it goes bankrupt, you get caught for corruption ect. Eventually you work your way up to Mayor and you've inherited a city that's just nonsense. Sewage plants next to hospitals, all the schools have been bulldozed to make way for fast food restaurants, crack cocaine is legal and half the city is addicted to it ect.
At that point you get actual control of the city and have to recover it before you can move on to the next map.
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).
My game idea is called Horny on Main and it involves annoying as many people as you can by being really horny on main. The more people you annoy or make horny the higher your score. Currently looking for coders and artists.
Okay fine since you asked:
DELICATEKKEN (name permission pending)
By day you run a respected deli and restaurant, by night you fight rival chefs to the death. Defeat them to earn their secret recipes, spend the money from your restaurant on upgrades and special combat training
I would love to make an RPG game set in a post-climate-change world in which its the worst-case scenario. Equatorial regions become uninhabitable, Antarctica melts, >10m sea-level rise, all major nations collapse from resource scarcity and war. Siberia, northern Canada, Patagonia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and the newly defrosted regions of Antarctica Become the only habitable areas. It would be set a few hundred years from now, say 2300ish where humans have managed to recover a bit but are nowhere near back to where they were.
You are born in the Realm of Antarctica, which is a multiethnic state made up of refugees from all over the world. It has a Yugoslav style economy with markets and worker coops. It has a multi-party democratic system with many different political parties. There are parties that have ideals like communism, liberalism, and fascism, but they are different from the ideologies of our world due to evolution and data loss. (Oh yeah, the Resource wars destroy the internet and most libraries, so finding information about the old world is difficult.)
One of the main projects of the Antarctic state is to gather information as to why the old world collapsed so that it can be avoided in the future. You play as an archaeologist/anthropologist working at the main university in the country and are given a task by the government to venture into the wastelands to collect information to further their research. You have a team of people who come with you, with differing views and will draw out different conclusions from the expedition. You may also encounter expeditions from other nations and there will be options to interact with them in ways meaningful to the story. And also there are isolated pockets of humans that have managed to survive the catastrophe, you may run into them too, although they are distrustful of outsiders.
The results you gain from the expedition will be used to make improvements to antarctic society, should you be able to win the favour of those in power. But it will not be easy, and if the results prove too controversial you may be silenced. From there the only option would be to organise a rebellion against the government.
Ideally, I would want some sort of conflict to emerge but I'm a bit stuck on where to go storywise from here.
Workers and Resources is like the "hardcore" version of Tropico. Not as pretty, but the simulation is much more in-depth and satisfying to get right, though unlike Tropico there's no events or internal politics to keep things interesting in the late game - you pretty much just either set everything up efficiently enough that it works, or you fail and everyone emigrates ("escapes" as the game puts it - the devs have said that they plan to add a Berlin Wall-inspired mechanic at some point) somewhere else.
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
My idea for a game is opening Unity, opening up a beginner tutorial to look at for 10 minutes, then closing Unity and feeling sad
no but seriously I have a load of little ideas, I have very few specific ones. Lately I've been thinking about a class-based multiplayer FPS similar to Team Fortress 2 that's been mostly fueled by me thinking of mildly interesting weapon ideas and trying to theorycraft how to make a sniper interesting and engaging to fight against as as a non-sniper (I get headshot a lot in every video game and I am 100% mad). Most of my ideas are very vague like this.
A more concrete idea I had a while ago that I'm kind of fond of was a cyberpunk RPG, the initial idea was it was mission based with odd jobs and that typical sort of Shadowrun corporate mercenary stuff, but that could easily be changed into a different format and I'm not too attached to it. The other side of the game is that you have your actual regular life in your shitty apartment, and it's sort of a very light life sim with affording rent, buying food, paying the electric bill, furnishing the apartment, etc. alongside buying any sort of "player character gear" like ammunition and medicine and this is at its core really just managing money. However, you also have a Stress mechanic which acts as a sort of a lump sum of psychological needs; various things in the "regular" part of gameplay, like combat, can increase it, and high levels of Stress have direct negative effects, whether that's shaky aim or stat debuffs. Various comforts decrease Stress, and that can be nicer food, a nicer electronic thing, drugs, buying and caring for a pet, and all of that obviously costs more money. From a narrative perspective it's a good way of keeping in mind that the player character is still a human being who's not going to enjoy getting in a gunfight then sitting in an empty dark room eating exactly 2000 calories of nutrient paste, and from a gameplay perspective it gives two conflicting goals that prevent the player from just getting the cheapest possible options to keep their character alive.
That one is about as detailed as my ideas get, I don't think I can focus on something like this any further without being able to actualize it. Sorry if this post is kinda all over the place I'm a little sleep deprived.
The best sniper tools I've seen in games are projectiles like (cross)bows, telegraphed charge beams like the Spartan Laser, and some really esoteric things like the Smoker from L4D. You need interaction to make things interesting, instant invisible death is boring
telegraphed charge beams like the Spartan Laser
That's a really good idea, it shows exactly where and when the shot is going to be so you can react to it, instead of just showing the sniper's presence like the TF2 dot or Battlefield scope glint.
I should find an online game with easy modding tools, I want to rapid prototype this sort of stuff
My pie in the sky idea is something like Mount and Blade, but where you build up bigger and bigger squads of more and more specialized soldiers to fight bigger and bigger monsters.
A bit like Monster Hunter, but every player controls like 20 guys with pikes, or thirty guys with crossbow, or some kind cadre of mages doing big and complicated magics.
