Ask HN: What do you want to work on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you want to work on?

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If you want to work on your own project(with the goal of generating income out of it) then what domain would you like to work in. And if you are looking for someone to work with, then what skill-sets/traits do you prefer in your dev buddy?

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I don't expect to generate any revenue from it, but if I start it's going to be a TUI MMORPG. Not exactly a MUD but a MMORPG with a roguelike interface. I'll use Dragonlance setting as a foundation and take out anything that is too complicated.

Town + Adventure map: ASCII tilemaps (could also be rendered bitmaps of ASCII chars instead of real ASCII chars).

Dungeon: First person viewport which is similar to what we have in early ULTIMA/MM/Wizardry games. Enemies appear as ASCII arts. Walls appear as vertical colored lines. There is no "roof" or "ground" in the game, to further simplify things.

The rendering engine should be flexible enough to be switched to graphics mode if needed in the future.

I don't intend to put up a lot of interaction into the game as it's too complicated for me. So you could say it's an ASCII version of Diablo based on Dragonlance.

I'll need someone to create ASCII arts for the project but I can probably do it by own (i.e. copy from somewhere else). I'll also need some 8-bit RPG music and I can grab some free ones for sure.

I'd love to work on something that just generates stories. I know DF and Rimworld do this, but there's too much game in the way of the story. Many RPGs today also need about 30 hours+; I'm looking for something that tells you a story in 30 minutes, and you could even participate into how it goes and how it ends. AI Dungeon does this, but it's unstructured, and relies too much on the player's creativity.

Stories have their patterns - there's the 7 Basic Stories, there's your tropes, 3 Act Structure, Aristotle's rules of drama, 36 Dramatic Situations, and so on. So I try to start with plot and character as those are usually the non-negotiable bits, and then expand into generating something interesting.

There's a prototype here which deals with basic character and plot tropes, but I'd like to have it follow more of a pattern, more characters, more customization, data, and so on: https://random-character.com/

I generally think of ideas relating to games, mostly because that is what I generally do. I think there are a lot of classic game ideas that could be brought up to speed, and a lot of new game ideas that could be reduced to increase casual popularity (think: battle royal games like pubg, dayz, which then translate to 2d games that can support large casual player bases).

I also had an idea of a platform to fight against the idea of scalping and ultimately give artists higher proceeds from ticket sales (though does not have to be restricted to concerts, think PS5 release type events as well), but I have not many insights in to the industry and am pretty comfortable at my day job for now. I think it could work because it would be possible to start small (do things that don't scale) but also eventually lead to a general system of handling ticketing and selling... but who am I kidding, I'll probably never do it :)

I totally get the games approach. Today games and reality are obviously overlapping and because of Covid we can't put any of the new innovations back in the box. So how do we move forward?

I'm looking for some bad ass engineers to create something that is going to take over the advertising model. YES, its true.

Want to be part of changing the world?

I would like to work on scientific software. There are many things that can be done to help scientists focus less on software making and more on doing science this includes for example building solutions to run/chain models, report results, data management.. etc. I'm not sure if this can generate income easily, so I would love a partner who has some experience in marketing and maybe web development would also help.

I've built some calculator style apps. I didn't make money from them and it was solo.

I'd probably want someone with more sales background, a big network, and knowledge in the target domain. And of course with a similar level of commitment and determination.

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