What are some games that you wish existed?
You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.
[Extras]
- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)
- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)
- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans)
It would be like a cross between The Last of Us, Hitman, and The Secret World of Arrietty.
I don't like the difficulty levels of Hitman III though -- I wish there were a hell of a lot more victims to go after.
But the levels are AMAZING and fun and beautiful.
But anything that can capture the Hitman gameplay would be great.
The thief series was also amazing, but its so dated it doesnt run well on my super high-end gaming machine...
But one thing that was super cool in Thief were the arrow types: Moss, Rope, Water... Moss arrows hit the ground and spawn a soft bed of moss to allow for silent walking.
I wish Hitman had some of these elements...
Do you have the NewDark patch?
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146448&highligh...
Though I would start with a compilation patch: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149669
EDIT: Hitman and Thief are lit the only game-play-styles I prefer....
Whats weird Is that I dont know the difference bewteen I before SEE between Theif and Wierd.
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Anyway.. if you actually evaluate (ovulate - Lets go deep on etymology!) the mental dopamine construct,
Gaming is a super interesting thing.
SOURCE I WAS THE LEAD OF THE DRG AT INTEL IN THE EARLY 90s...
I saw the first 'unreal engine' and worked on the first AGP platforms and blah blah...
None of that matters any longer.
That said; im not a person who is ignorant..
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Katamari is a casual game (I prefer this genre) but now I wonder if there would be some way to make a more "simulationist" game that uses this scaling effect somehow.
loved that map. one of fave. and its variants. wish it was party of the current CS:GO distro
The world is much different - but it has A LOT of the game play you're asking for.
Additionally, I found it to be one of the most enjoyable games I've played in... maybe ever?
And by fun I mean CHAOS
Divinity Original Sin 2 - an entire RPG playable in split-screen co-op, with hard strategic turn based combat
- Narrative games. Think anything from Quantic Dreams (Heavy Rain, Detroit), lots of Nancy Drew games, Tell tale Games (Walking Dead). Note that none of these are co-op, but they're fun to pass and play. - Simple platforming games (we're currently playing Kirby and the forbidden land on Switch, will probably play Mario Odyssey after. I let her play the main character but take over if it ever gets tough) - Puzzle type games (Portal)
She isn't great at games, but she's getting better, and she enjoys playing them.
latest from that game developer: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23141182/ni-no-kuni-cro...
movie trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMe7PavaRQ
I believe the Terry Pratchett one is currently being made into an animated film or series.
I loved reading the Borrowers books as a kid and would play tf out of this game haha
In that game you (a Sasquatch) has to steal food from campers, resolve some mysteries, play mini games, build your place, and go to work disguised as human.
- Live in the "walls" (barracks) - Sneak out during curfew to do tasks and build things to open up more areas, and also for food - You nurture a relationship with the other prisoners and new ones arrive often
Check it out!
TINY MOUSE-SIZED HUMAN:
"Alas! The whole world is growing smaller every day. [Close on the tiny person, panning out ever-so-slowly to reveal, bit by bit, the cavernous enormity of the room.] At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
[Corner trap now visible, the camera holds steady and dwells for a moment on this sad, bleak fate. Suddenly, there is another voice from behind -- this is not a monologue after all.]
CAT, SLINKING INTO VIEW:
"You only need to change your direction." [CAT pounces, and promptly gobbles him up.]
There is a TTRPG exactly matching what you're after. Small folk setting for fate core. http://www.warehouse23.com/products/the-small-folk
Which has a brilliant play through in this podcast https://tabletoptales.roleplayingpublicradio.com/tag/top-of-...
Sounds similar to the movie Parasite.
I really like the idea; i'm thinking much in the same art style as something like Arrietty just slightly more western cartoonish vibes, but only subtle changes.
Household, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2lm/household
E.g. you are the newly elected president of Afghanistan/North Korea/Iraq/Other etc - now go rebuild infrastructure etc, set policies, see how the country develops as a result. E.g. do you invest in universal healthcare, or transport infrastructure? Is transport infra required while your country is still largely subsistence farming?. What about education - save money there and spend on natural resource extraction? How will that play out over decades and centuries?
It would be nice to have direct control over city-level layout etc - demolish this neighborhood for flood defences, put in railways, major roads etc linking different parts of your country (not sim city levels of simulation, more just at the major civil engineering level of that makes sense - happy for actual city population to grow organically as a result of major works).
Civ gets close, but it's too high-level and more focused on conquest. I want to zoom in and have more control over where major irrigation canals get built, where to best build a nuclear plant, where that bridge should go or which mountains to tunnel through for a railway etc. So instead of the grid being the entire planet, the grid would just be one country.
Edit: I am specifically interested in the "building" aspect (so think civ-style grid with units moving around doing things), and less so on simple a-vs-b decision game model you see in Democracy et al.
If you really want to shape a country in your direction, autocracy, or dictatorship is the only way. Otherwise, you become just another populist leader that always wins elections but nothing changes.
Just like in real life ;)
So... it's pretty realistic then?
Then was killed by a nun who disagreed with my no-state-religion policy. :D
It's a bit more abstract and counter-insurgency focused than your description, but sounds pretty similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_simulation_game
I recommend:
Conflict: middle East political simulator Shadow President
There's also an interesting one reflecting Stalin's challenges after world war 1 - he has to choose between guns and butter to prepare for the coming conflict with Hitler. Don't remember the name...
(I don't have an opinion either way, just curious.)
At a country scale some simulation techniques need to change. For example, tilemaps become ridiculously inefficient (a byte per 10m^2 becomes tens of GBs), so they either need some form of compression, or the simulation has to use vector-based maps instead (more like Cities Skylines).
Another quirk is that at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter, and that starts looking just like a normal distribution of the simulation data you put in.
This is very untrue, which is why this problem is infeasible.
It's sort of like simulating every atom of an object vs using Newtonian physics. There is a difference in accuracy, but it may not even become apparent or matter for gameplay.
Here's a tech demo of what I've been working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
I created a path finding algorithm that can simultaneously path 300,000 units to random destinations at a comfortable frame rate. Units can choose from any of the shortest paths between two points (there are many in a grid), and from those paths, can also choose the path that matches any preferences they have.
Very early stages of development still!
I'll be using old.reddit.com/r/Archapolis if you want to know when the first release is out.
It lets you control a small country and build basically everything from scratch, factories, railways, housing.
Honestly it hits most of the points you describe above.
It's also strongly influenced by Turkish politics, specifically the rise of Erdogan, which was a very complicated time for Turkey.
Build up a civ on 1 planet, scale to multiple planets, survive space whales...
- World in Flames
- Churchill
- Fort Sumter
- Food Chain Magnate
- A Distant Plain
My chief complaint with Civilization games is that they've become a history-themed board game. A fun board game, but less and less it doesn't feel like a history simulator.
The problem with "country" simulator is that countries are a more modern concept, the vast majority of human civilization doesn't feature strong nation concept. How do you model a country that goes from Villanovans to Romans all the way to Italians?
How do you model a civilization which can boom and collapse? How can you set the systems up to support things like the mayan collapse or the bronze age collapse? The fall of the roman empire? Technological regression? How technology truly transforms culture, engineering, politics, etc? Adding +1 to a score is nice and dandy but how you simulate your nation having dynamic classes enjoying luxuries based on location, industry and technology?
I want to see that the urban elite are using silver utensils while the farmers are stuck on wood. I want to see that the civilization used wood too fast and used it all up, causing a collapse.
I actually envision the map as a grid with each grid holding information about the people there. Population, class, technology, industry, culture etc. A rural tile would have low population and be influenced by other tiles. An urban tile might be generating let's say `copper age 3` and in a radius around it for some distance, their tools would be upgrading towards that level. But invading and pillaging this urban tile might lead to those levels dropping, setting a region back in many ways.
The hardest part I have is that I just want a pure simulation with no user input. Gamifying it ruins the purity of my simulation and leads to civilization the game!
Overall, RFC essentially builds a new game on top of Civ4. The best part is that there's a number of RFC-derived modmods with varying locales and mechanics. Here's a few that I would highly recommend:
* RFC Dawn of Civilization[0] - An actively developed fork of the original mod that keeps the "vanilla" feel and the global map.
* The Sword of Islam[1] - A Middle East themed variant that although is long-abandoned is one of the most polished modmods
* RFC Europe[2] - Self explanatory. Focused on Europe starting from the rise of the Franks ending with the Industrial Revolution.
[0] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-ci...
[1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rf...
[2] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-eur...
https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-o...
I lived there for more than a year and a half. The things happening there now are terrible. But you don't know about it, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it right now. It's a massive tragedy.
I'm sure mods will make the game somewhat more fun and I'm probably going to buy the game for that reason, but after playing the beta I have absolutely no faith in Paradox's ability to live up to Victoria 2 despite it being a heavily flawed game that ended up being mostly a commercial failure. The worst part about all of this is how much effort they're spending on completely inconsequential things, like replacing the icons for POPs with horrendously ugly, anachronistic 3D characters. Something tells me that it was just an attempt to recoup losses from CK3's development. But don't worry, I'm sure Paradox's newfound console audience will enjoy Import-Export Trade Deal Manager 2022 and keep the company afloat.
Marble Age is notable too and has some mechanics unique to the game. Story is mostly the same, but there's three city states with slightly different tech trees. E.g. you'd need to fight the Persians at some point. Athens would be the classic path of farming, making alliances, building a wall and armies. Spartans need to raid for slaves for growth, but hold off on killing neighbors before facing Persians. Corinth would be more trade based and consider buying mercenaries and buying out the other city states.
I've bought all of them because they're an excellent ratio of time for fun as far as games go.
You are the government leader of a nation and a new pandemic is starting.
The science is not clear yet. How do you manage as the leader? What policies do you set up? What research do you pursue? Along with variables of budgets, economy, population morale, upcoming elections, travel, etc.
If there was a good model of how the policies affect economy especially, it would reveal to the players how hard lock-downs are on the economy.
If the dynamic between the federal state and city governments are modeled, it would show us how actual policy implementation happens. Just even how hard it is to test and track the spread of a pandemic.
This could indicate to people how hard it is to lead in such a situation. At the same time help the player evaluate how things were handled recently.
Nominally it's an experiment to see which government and organizational structures are the strongest, though being a multiplayer game it can devolve into who's fighting skills or automated bots are the best.
If you were to 'take over Iraq' the first thing will happen is that one of your political challengers will use all of their means to usurp you.
The issues are power, control, corruption, clan loyalty, incompetence, dysfunction, bureaucracy, radicalism, laziness, embezzlement, short nearsightedness, lack of key resources, petty infighting, political inconsistency and duplicity from supporting nations, bureaucracy etc..
What happens when the entire system is corrupt? The Judiciary, Police, the Army, the politicians? Everyone is trying to embezzle, selling votes, stuffing ballot boxes, using multiple ledgers, giving their family members jobs, handing out MD's to the rich kids?
Some Billionaire owns the TV Station and is lying about you daily, destroying your ratings. There are protesters outside your door while you're trying to 'plan the buildings'.
The guy who funded your campaign to ascension wants special state-guaranteed contracts.
The rebels in that 'ugly border area' have killed some civilians and the locals want blood.
... and consider that many of the same kinds of constraints exist even in modern countries.
'Building Bridges vs. Schools' is completely pedantic exercise.
They should make the game called 'Saddam' and see how a regular person might fare at that 'job'.
If you get 10 million through corruption you are basically set for life in a positive interest/rent seeking environment because interest acts like a force multiplier on your original act of corruption that gets stronger over time. So your personal goal is to earn as much money as possible, as early as possible and through any foul means. I.e. the reward function strongly favours corruption.
With a negative interest rate, corruption no longer guarantees a high social status and automatic wealth accumulation which means you will have to do honest work until you retire if you want to keep your money. Automatic wealth accumulation is the primary metric that makes money laundering profitable or not. If you can only make 25% of the stolen money clean you can still grow it exponentially over time after it is clean.
If the land value tax is paid out as a dividend then everyone, even the destitute, would benefit from classic USA style homeowner corruption (artificially distorting the allocation of land by restricting it's use).
Another form of corruption would be to spend your student loan on Bitcoin when it was still under one thousand and then skipping college because you "made it". You earned money without producing anything, you are a net negative to society if you don't work for even a little bit.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27773...
I probably spent more time playing it (and Alpha Centauri) than Civ.
Back in the day when the genre was new, people were fascinated by the potential of virtual worlds and virtual societies. Social scientists did online studies on player behavior and the interactions people had online, on spontaneous self-governance coming into existence, on how communities formed and developed, and many other similar topics. That potential was never fulfilled.
Today - some twenty years later - the MMORPG has become a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you. Apart from PvP and maybe some forced grouping, most games would play absolutely identical mechanically, if you were playing all alone on your own private server. You'd do the same quests, fight the same enemies, get the same loot. All the other players you get to meet online - they don't actually influence the game mechanics at all.
You play next to each other. Not actually with each other.
I'd like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts. Some glimpses of this sort of thing can be seen in games like EvE. Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day. This kind of stuff has evolved very, very little since then.
I would assume that with today's technology we should be able to get a lot closer to fulfilling that potential.
Tip of the hat to you, good sir!
Still, Minecraft is pretty limited mechanically. The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention. The games' mechanics - all the technological progression and stuff - work perfectly fine in single-player. Also the number of players per server isn't quite on MMO levels...
But yes, some elements of Minecraft would be great ingredients of the game I'm proposing.
With mods, it does.
To be fair, neither does real life. Real life shops, jails, etc, are just collections of atoms with certain emergent properties resulting from how players have set them up.
Tell me, what town did you mainly reside in? I was over in Chiapas with the crazy leftists, one of whom erected a wool statue of himself. We were largely untouched by the HCF invasion, except for when their skirmishes with the World Police got close to our borders.
I offer you this classic, and hope you recognize it: https://youtu.be/BAzsolKHJfc
Dirty Ancaps everywhere. </s>
I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between late 1.0 and early 2.0, but I ended up in Carson City for a bit when it was coming online. Where they made a hole in the ocean, and turned into a city. A fun place to hang out and talk shit.
Do you have any 2d world maps of that era?
A true FPSMMORPG. Closest thing we have to this with a good community is Destiny. I wish for fully open worlds, good storylines and everything you said. I believe that was the original idea with the project that became Overwatch but sad it didn’t pan out.
I understand that level building and all is much harder when the expectation of detail is higher in FPS but hopefully that gets easier with better tools. I would think that it’s still Bungie’s ultimate goal. Hopefully Destiny can evolve into that. Whatever game does it right, has the potential to be one of the biggest games ever.
Open world yes - that's totally an ingredient that goes in there.
Storylines rather not. The thing is that storylines are pre-written, canned content that's just identical for every player that consumes it. In order to fit my bill, the "plot" of the game would actually have to be defined by what players are doing (and the game simulation reacting to that) - it would have to emerge dynamically. Saga of Ryzom originally tried to go a little bit along those lines, but due to the technological constraints of the day, the game world would have to evolve through updates/patches mostly.
The commercial game is now run by a finance guy and a web developer, pretty much. Neither of which seem to be interested in pursuing the original more daring vision.
The tech is definitely capable of being expanded into a real dynamic world.
What you see in the game right now is effectively auto generated placeholder content that got rushed in to have a deliverable by release.
Imagine if the tribes and mobs actually moved their locations dynamically, instead of being in the same spots eternally. Players could help out tribes, supply routes for trading goods between tribes would need to be maintained, mob populations would be affected by player activity, etc.
Wonderful screwing around game. An extroverted friend of mine during the pandemic made it his primary social network. Made a lot of friends.
You'll get snippets of how awesome the game could be if you play in an active outfit and try and coordinate in platoons... but oh gosh does that game have its warts as well.
It's a bit too static though, to fit the bill of what I'm longing for. Needs less pre-made modules, more dynamic simulation - so that the game world actually evolves in response to what players are doing. ;)
One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?
SWG for example had all items being player-made in addition to slowly loosing durability and breaking eventually. That means, instead of finding loot you can then use indefinitely, you were dependent on economy supply chains. SWG also made you dependent on player services - like doctors, entertainers and such.
I think there could easily be many casual friendly playstyles, like farming, harvesting, herding, entertaining, being mayor in a player city, etc. - in addition to more combat oriented play. Players should be able to choose one style or the other, or mix and match to their liking. And every such playstyle should both need and provide "stuff" from/to other playstyles on a regular basis.
It is a very strange "game" though, so I understand why it's not for everyone.
Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.
Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.
If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.
Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.
An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.
Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.
Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.
And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.
Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.
Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back
addendum: also infinite dendrogram
a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .
It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.
Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).
Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.
There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.
I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.
Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.
At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.
Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.
Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.
But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".
You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.
Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.
But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.
Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.
They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.
BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.
Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.
The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.
Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.
I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D
I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.
>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.
I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.
I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.
In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.
Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;
You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.
That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).
Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.
Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.
There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.
For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.
You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.
It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)
In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.
So I wasnt convinced it would stick.
I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed
The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.
I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.
Doubt.
I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.
Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.
I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?
The key point is that all missions should be impactful on the world, and not merely reward oriented.
We have the tech for an MMORPG. We've been working on simplifying the onboarding curve for new contributors first. In a few months we can start exploring game mission mechanics. :)
New World hit on some of these points at one point, but they backed down pretty fast.
Ashes of Creation may or may not hit some of these points. But that game is... overly ambitious, to say the least. They're trying to go full tilt on everything and I'm skeptical as to whether it's gonna work out well in the end.
My friend and I started building on the side of a pond far away from everyone. We would get home from school and tie our house phone to our heads with our dad's tube socks so we could stay in constant communication while we collected resources and build up our enterprise.
1. Raise prices enough to employ enough humans. I imagine there's quite a few people out there who'd be happy to spend a pint's price on a quality gaming experience.
2. Give the GM better tools. Higher level half-scripted events + better sentiment monitoring. I imagine a single competent GM can run in parallel a bunch of events keeping quite a few players engaged.
3. Recruit experienced players to do this job for you. I imagine there's quite a few people who'd do this job for in-game goods, as long as an hour of GM-ing gives a couple hours worth of grind of goods.
Feels like a FAANG job
But yes, sandbox MMO's were a different beast than the themepark MMO's we have today, I had high hopes for Everquest Next when it was announced (like ten years ago now) but it ended up vaporware I guess, and that was the last I've heard of anyone actually trying. I guess metaverse might count but I've mostly ignored anything that facebook tries to do.
From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:
games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried. [...] hopping online to go do your second job [...] implies work [...] no one wants to do that work
The fact that the spaceship game was intertwined with the team-based FPS was really cool. FPS players (on planets) could be in the same clan/guild/corp as the spaceship pilots, and could call in airstrikes. In the spaceship game, your corpmates could maneuver into position and rain down lasers. This interaction had an effect on the local economy, which was an incentive for the spaceships to show up for airstrikes.
Maybe you want a pvp focused MMO? Maybe something like PlanetSide with more of an economy? Either that or maybe you want some big story points influenced by players?
Honestly I think you'd probably be disappointed unless you are personally part of the group that made the influential change. That takes a lot of investment as the mechanic would either be pvp or feel like its on rails.
Maybe you just want an RP wow server and a guild that is into grinding for Glam/RP loot according to their own stories?
I don't see how it's a technical problem at all. It sounds like your major issues are with story telling. Can you explain what technology you think is missing?
That said, I think part of the problem is that we've all gotten older, and no one has time to spend 5+ hours a day in a game world anymore. The younger generation may be able to experience it, but for those of us who have memories of old MMOs, it's unlikely we'll ever truly relive those nostalgia-filled moments.
+ Rust
+ Ark
+ Conan Exiles
Seems a great game.
Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.
Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.
Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.
I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!
Conan Exiles is another game that has RP servers of a different variety.
It can be a lot of fun with the right group of people. There's also a lot of flexibility for adjusting the game's parameters, so you can make it work with 2 people or 20 so that everyone needs to work together but the tasks don't seem insurmountable. It's one of the most novel and interesting multiplayer game concepts I've played in recent memory.
As obnoxious as I’m being, the thrust of basically any MMORPG is grinding hours of boring tasks to get minutes of awesome time with the fruits of your labor. That’s how they make you stick around - roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. You remove the grind (d3 auction house) and you remove your players.
My point is, most MMORPGs depend on giving you relatively simple tasks but finding ways to make them take three hours.
The larger and wealthier your country becomes, the more you become a threat to other powerful nations who will want to stamp you out. Or maybe there would be revolutions, alien invaders, etc. if you become too powerful.
Alternatively, if the players of the realm fail to defend their lands or make peace with their enemies, they might be conquered and forced to live under another empire, fighting their wars and paying high taxes, until one day they can scheme to win their independence again.
Of course, this does essentially mean your world can become irreparably messed up, but that’s life. Maybe people would give up on a server and move on to a new world with new ambitions about how they can do better next time.
Tibia too. It used to be an extremely social game. Everything was hard so people had to play together. It's been modernized and made much easier, nowadays it feels like the magic is gone. The changes began with restrictions on player killing and spiralled from there.
Complex simulation based mechanics are much harder to implement than more basic fighting mechanics.
Puzzles require more work and hand crafting than creating new monsters to kill.
The whole project is probably more work, harder to scale, and has an unproven audience.
This describe Soulforged perfectly: https://play.soulforged.net/
It's funny but if you drop by the Discord, we've been having lengthy conversations yesterday on why this might not be fun.
The short of it is that it hurts solo players and individualism. Communes are extremely powerful and necessary for progress. There are also certain professions that are popular (like mining) but gated because of the rarity of mining picks. So a lot of people give up on their mining dreams for the greater good. The mining problem was patched just this morning, but solo gameplay is still a problem - you need to be part of some group to get anywhere.
The other major problem with a sandbox is many have no idea where to continue. They chop wood poles and then chop higher level wood and making housing from that. And then don't really have much to aspire for other than hoarding wealth. So the dev is adding quest-like features: one classic MMO quest system and a player based system, where people can pay for say, ore, or a rare material found from certain beasts.
But the world is based a lot on the players, from settlements to the name of materials.
If you guys plan on joining, civilization is past the river. Head south outside the tutorial cave, then keep moving NE past the bridge. The roads are also player built but nobody got around to making roads for the newbies.
Half the player base decided to quarantine. There was a route west, which involved a dangerous swamp and a climb up a mountain that most newbies couldn't make if they didn't have the right buffs. New citizens would be escorted to the mountain, quarantined for 4 days, then buffed so they could cross it.
The other group was the "gains" group. They figured out that sparring increased stats rapidly and they could buff stats to the point where the disease was no longer a problem.
So then there was a PvE war with the orcs, which hit an uneasy peace, where the player base decided to just give tribute of weapons and armor to them. A third faction spawned, the orc sympathisers, who snuck more steel weapons to the copper age orcs. A smith player unlocked the orc race this way and black market emerged trading iron to the orcs.
The gains faction were uneasy with this and broke the peace treaty. The rest of the game, unhappy with breaking a treaty, moved west.
The gains faction conquered the orcs. The orc god was impressed and there was a party involving player-crafted beer, and a brawl with a god that increased someone's dodge skills to superhuman levels. The orcs were assimilated and they created a warrior-murderhobo faction in the north. They took on small territory, near a rich mine and some rare leathers used in armour. By the end of the game, everyone up north including chicken farmers had the highest tier swords.
The isolationist faction had a larger block of land and established trading relations with the dwarves. They got access to many of the remaining dungeons and artifact zones.
Sadly the game died shortly after, because of tech debt, server costs, and a burnt out player base. After a year, it was rebuilt into what became Soulforged today.
Also see this game, ECO: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/
listen to first 10 minutes of this podcast: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/brad-will-made-a-tech-pod/79-...
The caveat to a game like that, is it lives and dies by it's player count. You really want to be on the bandwagon when it kicks off.
They were for all intents social constructs with the game as the centre point. I'm looking to build a new version with different scenarios but it is the social aspect that makes them so compelling.
The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.
However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.
The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.
Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!
Ultimately as I got older they became too much of a time sink and I just can’t play them anymore, but back in my high school days they were an absolute blast.
I would love to fly my cheap, derelict Lada Riva equivalent of a spaceship into a space station. No landing sequence or wrestling away of controls, I want to land on my own and I want to land shittily. As I touch down, garbage is stirred up and space rats scurry away from the landing site. I get out of the ship (of course, the canopy jams and needs some hitting to open) and some spaceport employee alien comes running towards me to complain that I'm parked across two landing pads. I walk away, muttering "yeah, whatever" and head to the bar.
...you get the picture. This world, with trading, exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it.
So, now that I've gotten eight years older but still haven't seen the game release, it makes me kinda sad.
Relatedly, another PopSci article [1] promised that flying cars would be available by ~2015. That never happened either :-(
[0] I read it in print, but here's the online version: https://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/space-game-gets-real/.
Elite Dangerous supports VR but everything is too clean. You need that layer of dirt and wobbly landings for authenticity.
(Disclaimer - I've only played all of like 15 minutes of ED in VR)
The closest contenders IMO are StarSector, the X series, Free Space 2 with extensive modding. Then many games that are similar to those 3.
I have still yet to find a space game holistically more enjoyable than EVN though.
Plenty of low-brow there as well, and basically being forced into the plot against your will is very on-point for a "I just want to make a buck" character.
How can that be enjoyable though? You're just hauling cargo from point A where it's cheap to point B where it's expensive. Even in Eve's player driven economy it's a grind.
> exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it
Completely agree. I really enjoyed exploring planets in Elite Dangerous.
But not this https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Dwarf_XI:_The_Game
It's 86% off on Steam right now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/242940/Anachronox
But it's not a space combat sim, it's a sci-fi RPG.
Look, I'm an old man now. I can't compete on reaction speed against 13-year-olds micro-managing each unit to perfection. But I can macro. I can plan. I can strategize. I can do that better than those damn kids.
I want everyone to have a pool of 5 orders, refilling itself by 1 order per <time period> (1 second? 3 seconds?). Orders can be to as many or as few units as you want. And if you give too many orders, they queue up until you have more to give.
I love turn based games, but there is definitely a different feel with a RTS that feels less ‘boardgamey’.
I know what OP means - ie StarCraft without the micro.
I have played it for almost 50 hours now and I don't feel you have to do things too quickly if you aren't aiming to be in the top 100. If you have already memorized your plan and responses, it becomes pretty slow and stress free.
It's only 1 second or so, and lots of actions are off the GCD, but all you would need to do is extend that time and put more things on the GCD and you'd effectively get what you're looking for.
I don't think it'll slow things down as much as you're hoping for, though.
It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.
There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.
Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.
Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.
Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.
This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.
... if you meet the bare minimum.
You won't have large success in StarCraft if you won't even notice the banelings running toward your marines, not even talking about splitting them.
- you made marines
- they are accessible to a-moving banelings without having to go around terrain and/or through tank fire, marauders, mines
It's quite possible to do low-apm styles in SC2, but you have to actually do them, rather than trying to be budget Maru.
The only player input is to move a beacon. The beacon has the same movement speed limit for all players, so the only thing left is to strategize how to move the beacon so the "army" can engage in the best way.
For example, you can tell a soldier, "attack this general area" or "attack in this direction", but you can't actually micromanage their movement and other actions.
Then you introduce mechanics/stats like "communication effectiveness", "professionalism", "morale" which increase or decrease the precision, latency, and effectiveness of commands. For example, an elite special forces unit might have perfect command reception, allowing you to micro it. But a grunt would have very low reception and need a nearby commander's aura to boost their reception and allow even the most basic commands through.
At some point I toyed with the idea of an Idle strategy game. Battles would play automatically, and as a player your intervention was purely at the strategy level: manage your armies, resources, etc. Think Total War but every battle is auto.
This was a bit boring so I pivoted a little: battles would be mostly automatic, but players had a limited number of actions. For each battle players would set up their troops and these would fight automatically. You'd have a limited number of action points, say 6, that you could spend on things like spells or reinforcements. Also you would win 1 action point for every minute.
I wrote a prototype for this, but I never made it work. In my mind I imagined an epic struggle where two players would fight tooth and nail for several minutes until one just about won the battle. In practice battles were either an endless stalemate or one player quickly steamrolled the other.
There might be a good idea there, but it might require far more work balancing and pacing that I could put into it.
It's an RTS but with very calm/slow pacing and is very forgiving if you don't want to zone into it like other fast paced rts games.
I would have preferred it to be either "enter tile and attack what's there" vs "retreat".
There is a reason why they are a completely different genre of games.
I enjoyed playing Age of Wonders (all titles) because I was getting frustrated with Starcraft: Brood War.
But I also like the real-time aspect. I like the urgency. I just want something in the middle between "You can't move your hand ultra fast so you lose" and "I will spend 10 minutes considering the optimal move".
There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.
Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.
I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.
turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.
Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake
Also check out Beyond All Reason, it's a modern Total Annihilation where you're essentially trying to automate economy and production and the game provides a lot of tools to do that.
Most engagements are just: form a concave, pre-split/siege, cast a couple spells, a-move.
Give the kids a fighting chance, ya know?
2) Anachron is a RTS with time travel, and issuing commands in the past depletes a resource, so it does something similar but for a very different purpose.
Mode 1: You create an account and are given a small ship. You and your dinky ship fly around the universe making trades and doing missions. There are pirates and you tend to get exploded a lot and flying around is tricky because the planets have gravity. You trade and get rich and buy bigger ships. Then you become even more rich and start buying automated ships that will make trades and go on trade runs 24/7 while you're not playing. Pirates blow up those ships and steal the loot, so you buy bigger routes with guard ships. You start posting missions for new players to guard your fleets. You become very very rich and start buying on-planet real estate or maybe whole planets and customizing them. You're managing your fleets and missions and contracts and stuff mostly from your mobile phone at this point without actually logging in and flying around.
Mode 2: you don't create an account. You're just a pirate. Nearly the whole world is hostile to you. It will only take a couple of hours of play to grow from a tiny pirate to a universe-threatening dreadnought the likes of which the average account-holding players couldn't afford, but as soon as you stop playing, your pirate ship is lost and you must start again.
> Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to the classic Escape Velocity series. Explore other star systems. Earn money by trading, carrying passengers, or completing missions. Use your earnings to buy a better ship or to upgrade the weapons and engines on your current one. Blow up pirates. Take sides in a civil war. Or leave human space behind and hope to find friendly aliens whose culture is more civilized than your own.
I love how many people it has fiddling with the code and storyline.
I know it's not something that can realistically happen, but I'd love for all games to switch to open-source after a few years of being available commercially.
It's cool to see continuous development on Endless Sky. At times... wish some features and improvements would go faster, but hey... that's part of playing with a non-commercial product. It's just a casual train-set in my basement... tinker a bit, play a bit, it's just sort of fun to see both sides.
Star Control II is a collection of different interrelated minigame mechanics. You have spacewar-style combat, planet exploration resource collection, interactive storytelling with the communications with other races, resource and time management, ship and fleet customization, and exploration of the universe.
But some planets could require a side-scrolling platformer, instead of the top-down lander. Or you could put together a jRPG-style party and explore a settlement on a planet. You could play a Scumm-style adventure game on an abandoned space station. In addition to spacewar, you could have a bullet hell shooter for traversing an asteroid field. You could do economy management and trading, purchasing self-sealing stem bolts on Cardassia Prime and trading them for seal furs on Caladan. You could level up your crew to make them better at piloting ships in your fleet or participating in away missions. And of course we need procedural generation for the sake of replayability.
Btw, Mass Effect was very inspired by Star Control with its use of minigames for mineral collection. I really want a game that's more of a 50/50 mix between Mass Effect and Star Control.
The game itself was lovely. The writing was good. The art was good. The combat was fine. The lander and everything adjacent to it was frustrating; not only did it bounce around like a caffeine-addled pigeon, the things you'd do with the resources were not satisfying. The game was short, but it was supposed to be a platform upon which other people would build using a campaign editor, and then the entire community hated Stardock and nobody wanted to create more content.
The best part of SC2 is that it is impossible to know ahead of time if your encounters will result in making loyal allies or barbaric enemies. The only way forward is to keep exploring the galaxy.
For me, the main appeal of SC2 and first Mass Effect game was a sense of a huge undiscovered galaxy where the wonders are. The joy of finding your first rainbow world was immense.
A new version is being developed!
I did only play Ur-Quan Masters, though, and in like 2006, at that. I wasn't aware of the original until UQM.
https://www.dogarandkazon.com/
https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/
EDIT: Looks like this is being developed just presently:
Star Trek: Bridge Crew comes closest to what I'm talking about. Imagine that but not VR (well, VR is cool for this, but I don't have a VR headset, so...) but more of a Firefly type of atmosphere.
There was once a UDK demo or sample game that mixed FPS with space combat that was cool. Each player on a team started in a large ship, which someone could fly and other team members could control cannons, or run around the ship, or get into single-person fighters to attack and board the enemy ship. I don't remember what it was called, just that I got it as a sample when downloading UDK way back when it was still a thing. It was pretty cool!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/FTL_Faster_Than_Li...
And barotrauma, I Can't remember another game now
And almost everything has varying levels of complexity. Sure, there's a pretty deep medical system with dozens of medicines of varying side effects and effectiveness for whatever ails you. Or you can just stuff yourself full of morphine (leading to the aforementioned crew of opiate addicts). You can just set the boat's ~~on board barbeque~~ nuclear reactor to automatically scale turbine output and heat levels, but either through manual management or more advanced logic circuitry you can make your boat better suited for high-intensity situations.
It does take a handful of friends to really enjoy, though. Makes it hard as an adult, but scheduling play sessions is a nice social gathering.
PULSAR with just a tiny, tiny drop of SpaceTeam would be ideal, IMO. At least last time I played it, it was a little dry. Random stuff should happen in the bridge when you get hit (not full-wacky SpaceTeam stuff, just, like, piped shooting out of the wall) (I haven't played in a while so maybe I am out of date).
That being said I would love a more grown-up version of this with more than two players.
My friend and I used to play it a lot, but we were hilariously bad at it.
We would end up bickering at each other over mistakes and sometimes self sabotaging the ship out of frustration. All in good fun though, we had so many good laughs over dying in stupid ways.
Definitely need at least 1 friend to play though. Single player gives you a little CPU dog that you command around, but it's not nearly as fun.
I want a game like this but as a company simulator with metaphorical roles, with the businessmen from Adventure Time.
It's been ~22 years since I've played it, but IIRC there was one player that essentially played an RTS game, but the various units they were "controlling" were all actual players flying their own spaceships. I don't think there was any concept of different players working together on one ship, but there definitely were different ship types each player could choose to fly.
It wasn't a market success, but I always wondered if that was somewhat caused by the way they released the game: there was a long and very large free beta program, and by the time they decided the game was finished and put it in boxes I was a done for a bit and took a break. Always wondered how many people felt like I did.
The interface is just a proxy for spaceship stations so you can't run around the spaceship though.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/247350/Artemis_Spaceship_...
The old Battlefront 2 also had a (simpler) form of this type of capital ship combat, where the bases were the ships and players would dogfight in space and attempt boarding actions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3fsvKnIVJg
It's not exactly what you're looking for, but still the most unique and fun game I've played in this "group of people piloting a spaceship" genre.
You play on a phone with other people physically next to you, each person being presented with a randomly generated UI elements with labels that's purposely confusing.
To keep your ship traveling and alive, commands will randomly pop up on everyone's screens with instructions of what to do; The vast majority of which are on other people's devices.
If your team doesn't react fast enough, you eventually lose.
Sometimes you'll be hit by astronomical events like black holes or asteroid fields which cause the game to go much faster, leading to people stressfully yelling "WE NEED TO CREAM THE CORN. WHO HAS THE CORN, CREAM IT RIGHT NOW!"
Not what you're looking for, but I think a lot of readers here would enjoy it :)
I always want to suggest it to people who don't game much, but it can be a real struggle to get people to download an app. So, I have it on two devices, so I can handle at least one real stick-in-the-mud.
RECOMBOBULATE THE AERATOR! PAY TAXES! SURVIVE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!
> Barotrauma is a 2D co-op survival horror submarine simulator, inspired by games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Space Station 13. It’s a Sci-Fi game that combines ragdoll physics and alien sea monsters with teamwork and existential fear.
You have roles in your submarines, such as a medic, mechanic, engineer, captain. Everyone can do the same things, but some are better than others at different things.
If you have time, you can build your own submarine. The game also has a good amount of mods available.
Quick note: The game is in "Early Access".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/247350/Artemis_Spaceship_...
When I worked at SpaceX, a dozen or so of us once played it between the primary and backup mission control rooms. It was nice having the expensive headsets. All I remember is someone on the other team "hacking" our spaceship by using the company IT system to remotely reboot our team's computer terminals.
- Every player can use their tablets or phones, and as many as they'd like
- Each device can be assigned with different controls
- Wasn't sure if this would be decided before the game starts or if some player could control it, or if anyone can just add in controls as needed
- The game plays only on the ship bridge, there would be no first-person anything
- One device acts as the viewer screen
I liked the idea of players all hanging out in a living room, connect the "viewer" player to a TV, and just have fun. Some scenarios and situations would involve teamwork, like having an engineer reroute power from navigation (ie nav has to slow down to make power available) to weapons for more powerful shots.
I thought it would be fun to build, but I just didn't have the time to develop it myself.
Still beta and lacks players but I think that is exactly what you want
[1] https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ [2] https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ [3] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28345868 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343941
Think of MS Flight Simulator or Google Street View as documenting the current world. Then take the same approach to thoroughly document the past. The locations, the events, all in 3D VR with realistic graphics, and simulated actors that react to events and react to the players.
Take the current knowledge and physical/archaeological remains of the past, and digitise them, digitally renovate them. Do this rigorously and professionally. Not Hollywood-style approximation, but the work of real historians and archaeologists. Let historians use it and debate the details how it should really look, or how the events really unfolded and adjust it accordingly. Organise the database of content and simulations. AI is possibly already there to automate processing and conversion to 3D of old videos, photos and paintings, even perhaps writings to animation scripts. If not yet, some AI researcher is surely working on that.
Make a VR meta world, where players can travel to certain locations and certain time and interactively take part in the events.
I would pay a monthly subscription for such a thing, to see the past getting recreated digitally. It would be the next best thing we actually could do, compared to real time travel.
People die all the time in the most boring way (illnesses, accidents), battles are not that epic, no monsters or great heros, overall knowledge of the people are very shallow, etc.
Think a mashup of AC and forgotten city (a Roman game with a time loop that focuses on talking to the locals).
It presents a primitive material reality, but also the culture and supernatural beliefs.
It doesn't have to be without monsters, it just have to portray them according to beliefs of people of that time, and not according to our modern interpretation, or modern appeal. It could be an opportunity to also document ancient societies, culture, mythical beliefs too.
An addition. Also make a survival mode, where you are not just sightseeing safely, but also have to survive whatever is happening.
Premise:
"The Forgotten City is a narrative-driven time loop adventure in ancient Rome. Discover the ruins of an ancient underground city, travel 2000 years into the past, and unravel the mystery of who destroyed it by cleverly exploiting the power to wind back time. The fate of the city is in your hands."
Developer comment on historical authenticity:
"In terms of historical authenticity, we engaged two historical consultants: Dr. Philip Matyszak, who has a D.Phil from Oxford and teaches at Cambridge, and has written 17 books on the ancient world. And Dr. Sophie Hay, who has spent 20 years excavating the ruins of Pompeii. Dr Matyszak helped us to create a game world with historically authentic art, architecture, costumes and customs. And Dr Hay helped out with a comprehensive review, ensuring our architecture and art was consistent with her observations of Pompeii, which was preserved in a very similar time period. We spent over 20 months on this and exchanged 300+ emails and did video flythroughs."
Pretty sure my original concept was for this not to be a single game so much as a common interface for basically every other game, where unoptimised parts work, but aren't great, passing a kind of middle-of-the-range set of values whenever queried. By linking multiple games together, you'd be able to control everything.
Anyways, I'm working on Archapolis, a city builder game. The game will feature more hands on management than existing games in the genre, such as being able to design/build your own buildings. The player will see the interior of the buildings so making the exterior pretty wont need to be worried about. I'm also aiming to have a city board that will automate parts of the game for you if you choose (like having a fire marshall to handle fires)
I've got a tech demo of the path finding code up on youtube here, in case you're interested in path finding hundreds of thousands of units efficiently
Just guessing From what I see, it looks like you may have chosen a technical path that doesn't scale well even if the resource usage is reasonable at this scale (constant time != constant resource). There are certain features I want to have that I think your approach doesn't make viable, so depending on how your game evolves the algorithm may get in the way. You've probably already thought through some of that and figure with some optimizations maybe it will be enough for your needs. Might even have a little extra versatility in other ways.
Hope you find success! I'll keep an eye out on your project. One bit of feedback though, I would personally change the name. It's not fun to read and doesn't roll off the tongue very well.
Then I figured out a way to store the results in a vector while still maintaining constant time access, which lowered the space needed to 2.5 GB. (This discovery came after the linked video, hence not being mentioned)
For reference, 10,000 nodes would be about 50 x 50 blocks (~4 nodes per intersection). Using Manhattan sized blocks, that's about 13 square miles of city, which is the same area as 3 x 3 Cities: Skylines tiles. Should be way more than enough!
Regarding the name, my first choice Metropoly was taken by existing companies (plural), and there's a domain squatter holding metropoly.com. Im not attached on the name yet so there's room to change it.
Gah, it's so tempting to share my notes, because you'd appreciate a lot of the ideas in there. It's probably a bad idea though, because part of the motivation to actually develop it would be to share those ideas and the vision some day. :)
If this is something you are serious about then I'd recommend unlocking your enthusiasm and ideas. I'm not able to connect with you if you're secretive and indirect. If that makes sense then you're welcome to send me an email (see profile). My door is open to working with up to a small group of people, provided they can support themselves now and its a good fit.
Enthusiasm isn't a huge problem, it's partially that I have a great many interests of varying levels of importance where appealing ideas just pour out of my mind and that whole process enriches all other interests. The difficulty is that it keeps adding more and more considerations, so there's more complexity to comb through in order to prioritize.
Being vague is intentional, but not out of any disrespect. I'm doing strange things and part of their future appeal might be that they are strange, which wouldn't be the case if they become common in the market before I ever even get around to finishing it. :) That strangeness is also part of the problem, because there are a lot of harder to predict things that may go wrong.
Basically you'll be given some "special" buildings where you can place the other-genre games . Let's say that you have a "60x60 1 level hospital" that when you placed it in the city, you can interact with it via theme hospital style.
Now in theme hospital-like, it has reputation / ratings where it translate directly to "hospitality points" for your city. When you exit the mode, it stopped the simulation and the points freeze. Similar with factory points.
E.g. if you have a hospital which can handle X patients per day and has a reputation of 90 when doing so, increasing the number of patients to 2x would probably decrease the reputation. You don't need to model the full hospital to determine this though, just have a "max patients" value which, when exceeded, puts a fractional multiplier on the output.
And those "points" will also feedback as the input. Such as better hospitality points increase population cap, higher factory points allows the use of more equipments, higher education / tech points allows the use of more advanced equipment and ability to hire better doctors / engineers.
Now each "special building" have "budgets" assigned to them by the city. Those budget that'll be the balance and limit for equipment / room purchases and hiring, rather than directly received it from patients.
I always wanted to combine the Sims and Sim City. I imagined a multiplayer mode where you could live in the same city with your friends and your choice of career would allow you to use a different game mode at the SimCity level. E.g. your sim becomes a teacher, so now you decide where to place schools, etc. You have to work as a team to make sure all sims are happy in the city.
It would be a big open-source project (I mean it could be closed-source but it’s a massive effort with massive risk, it would take a billion-dollar company and I doubt any wants to invest in this).
It starts out as just a super-general world simulation, but people can flesh out the details by providing more specific simulations and also mini-games. All of the mini-games are optional, and the localized simulations aren’t run if they’re not requested because they get blurred out* into the bigger simulations (e.g. you can simulate population and income without caring about one cities’ paper production efficiency), so contributors have a lot of freedom in what they can make.
e.g. someone creates a “Fifa” style soccer mini-game. If you don’t like playing soccer, there is also a basic “soccer-management” style simulation where the soccer teams play against each other automatically and the team rankings / income / effect on news and culture will update. If you don’t even care about soccer, the soccer/management simulations won’t even load, and the effects on economy and culture will be blurred out.
How it could be implemented: there is a massive shared database of resources on everything (population resources, income resources, hospital resources, building layouts - all by location), and functions to automatically compute these resources over time when the players not explicitly interacting with them (e.g. update population and income, but also generate new cities and building layouts). Basically, everything in the game has data by some sort of location, an automatic state transition function, which may take other kinds of data and other locations, and possibly a way to manually interact via a user-controlled simulation and/or “hands-on” interaction mini game.
Along with this there is a standard-issue game engine and libraries which the smaller simulations and mini-games are built with. Each of these smaller-systems and mini-games are a module which can be loaded in when they are requested, but are “blurred out” by default. Initially only the global simulations are enabled.
The player makes up their goal: it may be to maximize the worlds income and happiness however they want (e.g. by building nice buildings, an efficient factory, train stations). Or maybe the player is evil and wants to kill off the population via bad decisions which cause the economy to crash, and unsafe research causes a deadly virus to be released. Or the player just wants to build cities and roads which are fun to race in and then drive a race car around everywhere.
Anyways, it’s obviously super ambitious but it would be a nice experiment. Like a generalized, open-source, modular reimagining of Dwarf Fortress.
* When a simulation is “blurred out”, I mean it’s affects are roughly estimated when the user doesn’t explicitly load it. Otherwise a) the game would slow to a crawl because of 10,000 simulations running at once, and b) a poorly-implemented simulation (e.g. which allows the player to generate infinite money, or just crashes a lot) won’t ruin the entire game, the player can just ignore or even specifically disable it. Simulating every minute detail of the world is a kind of hard problem, but since this is ultimately a video game we can just ignore 99+% of it, throw together some basic population and economic theory, and later on transportation theory and culture/politics sim etc., and say "close enough".
It’s like Sim City meets Transport Tycoon. Rather than just building a city it’s about setting up all the supply chains to be self sustainable
I wanted to manage an open pit mine myself. Have excavators that mine ore and trucks move it for processing, but as they do, the shape of the terrain changes, leaving deep holes behind. Maybe even compromising your factory as the mining operation expands.
And as it sometimes go, when you want something and that does not exist, you try to make it, and that was my case here. Together with a fried we attempted to make such game. It's called Captain of Industry in case anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...
Seriously wish the best for you, developing and releasing a game at all is a big feat, gaining traction is another beast entirely :)
those **ing pirates!
im going to buy this and play it!
Our "team" is tiny, it's just two of us. We've been working on it past 6 years as a hobby project over the weekends. Last year we decided to quit our tech jobs and focus on this full-time. We work with freelancers who do 3D art and music for us.
So if Factorio did this you could play as normal, or play the fractal version where you can go in and control the mine or anything else. Maybe there'd even be sub parts in the mine like repairing machinery or something. The full range of macro-micromanaging would be pretty interesting.
This could be even cooler in multiplayer where many people could be controlling different parts of the factory, different vehicles, etc. But this sounds like a little too much work to get it "right".
Mining is just "go mine here" but your colonists can only hold a certain amount of materials so retrieving mined materials can take a while, especially if you're mining far away from your base. Plus you have to worry about the materials being hot, or being affected by germs. You can technically mine out the entire asteroid, but I've never gotten close to that because something always goes wrong and everyone dies. There's only a limited amount of resources after all.
For example, the way how terrain collapses during mining is balanced to make a fun game rather than trying to be super realistic. We don't take into account weather effects (esp. rain). Also, in reality, hard rock needs to be blasted, but we don't have this feature (yet). Refilling of vehicles is mostly automatic, given that they have fuel available somewhere reachable. Etc...
On the other had, similar to other sim games, you will certainly need to think and plan your mine/factory well in order to be successful.
I love this game format (Skyrim, BotW, WoW) etc but they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time. I simply don't have that time anymore.
Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going), controls/mechanisms that aren't overly complicated (nothing worse than booting up a game and realizing you forget how to attack), etc.
Why do you think that? BotW I found was very amenable to consuming in short hour or two sessions, although it was incredibly easy to get sucked in for longer.
"Trying to kill Molduga for <reasons>, but want to use different armor, so traveling through Hebra for Coolshrooms".
The story though? Lol, BOTW has none. You just show up and chase whatever catches your fancy while the princess hangs out at the castle doing all the work keeping the monster at bay.
Good controls and quick review/tutorial seem to be overlooked opportunities for improvement that would dramatically lower the bar for casual gamers who want to play more games but quickly get frustrated by any kind of friction.
("Previously on" or self-evident state is increasingly dead even in TV/series so I guess it's not surprising it's disappearing from games too.)
TW2 and TW3 are some of my favourite games though and IMO had fairly straightforward controls. I do think I switched between playing with controller and keyboard + mouse though, so it may be worth trying controller in the 2nd/3rd games if you hadn't done that.
I do really appreciate Halo for finally going back to "everyone, regardless of level, starts with the exact same equipment and skills". That levels the playing field and I can still have fun (even if I'm not good) without playing a lot.
If you're up for twitch shooting, play instagib.
If you want action, hop onto a Clan arena match (team Deathmatch but 1 life per round, and you start the map with everything).
OTOH if you're too tired to frag, hop on a Xonotic Defrag Server, where your only goal is to practice movements to finish a track on time. Xonotic has some very cool quake like movements, and there are almost always people on the Relaxed Running server (but they also have >1 hr puzzle/trick jump tracks).
It's so much fun, even just for the 20 minutes I can usually get before going to bed ;)
Then reroll and do it again...
Add multiplayer and be double plus fun!
So... Skyrim’s quest log? A huge list of every quest you’ve encountered in the game so far, with the ability to pick one to be highlighted on the map and radar. Boot it up for the first time in a while and you can immediately see what Past You was officially working on. Pretty much every big sprawling open-world game has one of these, with a zillion text snippets to describe every possible stage of what’s happened so far in every quest, and what you need to do next.
Add a handful of generalized user-defined quests like “I am gathering (list of resources/items) so I can (make this thing/exploit this bug/do this quest a particular way)”, or maybe just an in-game notepad with some text completion assistance, and that probably covers any possible “where did I leave off”.
The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.
However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.
The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.
Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!
I want a sandbox where I can take a planet from its bombardment era all the way to a point where its start has started to encroach on the planet's orbit. I want to see live evolve from the soupy amino acid mixes that were brewed from shallow waters and watch it grow to a multitude of competing civilizations. I want my screen to feel alive in a "ants crawling over a petri dish" sort of way.
I want to do this with a very deep simulation, everything from geophysics, climate, and even solar insolation modeled. I want to see ice ages come and go with glaciers carving up the landscape and leaving behind lakes and fertile soil. I want to see oceans acidify and recover, cycling through colors. I want my screen to feel lush like a moss carpet.
I want my sandbox planet to have a moon.
I want to have a time scale that requires planning, where a few months of game play on the same planet feels rewarding. I want this planet to be persistent and to be shared where friends can just load up and watch or maybe even hop in. I want my friends space faring civilizations to come and visit.
I don't want a manual for anything more than interface. I want to be surprised by what happens on digital ball of dirt.
I want something that will have the fun spirit of Sim Earth, the seriousness of Universe Sandbox, open endedness of Powder Toy, and trigger that "into the unknown" feeling some of us got back in the early days of Minecraft.
Here they are:
The first one is a game where you play as Mormons, and the goal of the game is to be nice to people no matter the cost. It would start out with fairly easy things, but then you come across increasingly hostile or dangerous circumstances where you have to choose between negotiation or fleeing. You can't "die" in the game because, if you are about to die, either God or the angel Moroni will intervene. At that point, you must restart a mission. Then again, I'm not that opposed to the player dying either. I know not that much about Mormonism other than that I've known Mormons throughout my life. :)
Another idea I have is for a game I call "Monkey Town". It's somewhere between Sim City and The Sims, and takes place in a world where monkeys and various apes take the place of humans. They are as intelligent as present-day humans, but they do thinks in their own monkey ways. You are the mayor of Monkey Town, and you must build it up and maintain it. There are problems you have to deal with like monkeys pooping everywhere, political corruption, ape speciesism, infrastructure failures, monkeys rioting, monkey insurrections, etc. The monkey culture would have some differences from human society like knoodling being allowed in public, networks of vines are used for monkeys to swing between neighborhoods, bananas as currency, and so on.
My third idea is a game called "Shut Me Up", which I think of as more of a short arcade style game where your job as the player is to harass and scream at people so those people start telling you to shut up. But you keep doing it so that they start physically attacking you to get you to shut up.
When I moved to a nicer neighborhood and went to church once or twice I was amazed how many Pediatricians and Pediatric Surgeons who work at the local childrens hospital are Mormon.
The only worse thing I can imagine would be combining persecution complex-inducing game with an FPS.
Maybe you're right and I'm suggesting something that isn't really appropriate. I would play games more if there were more slice-of-life type games from different perspectives, but with some humor in there too.
Thanks for the feedback. :)
source: am one myself. This is true for the other members around me as well (friends, family, etc)
Game is still very early development, but here's a tech demo video
What's the tech stack you're using for the game? I'm not really familiar with how games are typically made these days other than that it seems like a lot of people are using Unity.
I'm using C++, SFML (graphics framework), and SQLite (for data storage/saves). Game & engine is developed from the ground up.
A lot of people choose existing engines for their games. I definitely would if I were to go 3D.
With 2D grid based games, it's not too difficult to get an engine up and running. It took me around 6 weeks IIRC (no physics or networking code though) to have basic tile placement functionality and outputting the game world to the screen.
I think mixing in just the right amount of janky ragdoll physics and glitchy NPCs would actually augment the game, and I could see it being a game that streamers and their audiences would find funny too.
There would definitely be some ultra-strict/traditional Mormons who would be offended by a game like this but I'd say the vast majority of the membership would find it quite entertaining.
Edit: Could call it Mormon Missionary Simulator to both give the game a slightly tighter focus/story and also indicate that it's part of the wider genre of "XYZ simulator" games that are often pretty absurd and funny.
The game concept is something I would play. It would fit well in any setting historical or fictional. A half-dozen elves trying to bring sensibility among Orcish chiefdoms guided by an avatar of Illuvar. A unmodified human among the transhuman houses of the galactic empire trying to re-cultivate aspects of humanity guided by an enigmatic Foundation, etc.
Regarding "Monkey Town," you might like Keith Laumer's book "The Other Side of Time." It starts off slowly, is all over the place, but has an alternate universe with several sapient primate species working together.
Apex Legends has got some of the aspects that made T2 so great, especially if you play Valkyrie (Apex's only flying character), but the weapons are not as much fun and you're wasting too much time on looting.
I loved aiming ahead near the ground of a skiing opponent and hitting them with the splash damage.
But the most amazing moments were when you hit someone mid-air. :)
It still blows my mind that 007 Golden Eye existed as a popular game at the same time with Starsiege: Tribes when they were worlds apart in quality and gameplay.
The modding scene for Tribes 1 really was something else.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I do think that GoldenEye was relatively more accessible in terms of MSRP and technical setup.
But that's the most fun part of Apex ;)
Hi-Rez certainly weren't a good fit for the game. I'll know better than to spend money on anything they're doing in the future.[1]
[1]: https://www.maxlaumeister.com/articles/rip-tribes-ascend/
I would want Tribes: Ascend back again as it originally was, but with good support for mods and private servers. That would make me happy.
By the latter I mean mostly the decision to eliminate base play, i.e. gens/turrets/invs mean basically nothing because you spawn in your load out. Also, the jetting/skiing physics are kinda wonky, in ways that I think negatively impacted gameplay.
There were also other roles you can’t see in the video (at least in the first minutes): there was an invisibility shield that allowed you to infiltrate enemy bases. You could set up sensors to make invisible opponents visible, deploy small turrets and radars. You could spend all game just repairing things like turrets, radars and inventory stations, and that was an important role in CTF. And there were vehicles that needed pilots, you could control turrets…
100%
Tribes 2 should have been "THE" early 00's FPS to play. Instead, it was Halo, a game that I insist did not introduce ANYTHING new to the FPS genre, yet people went crazy for.
Imagine RDR2 but with the replayability of Skyrim. There is a reason why Skyrim is still such a popular game and why most of us have purchased it more than once (which is weird, right?): because it is the ultimate example of a replayable game.
The focus on RDO takes the game a little bit in this direction, but the multiplayer aspect takes away from the immersion, and the fact that you can't have character names like Old Bill and instead see people called xX_SUICIDE69_Xx running around really spoils it.
I want to go fishing, put my fish in a cart, take them to market, sell them, then go play some poker with a beer, before returning home to my small shack that I'm slowly decorating.
Is that so much to ask for?
It lacked every ounce of the beautiful simulated West I love in Red Dead, but the core gameplay mechanics you're talking about are all there.
...I'm speaking in past tense but apparently it's still around? https://store.steampowered.com/app/99910/Puzzle_Pirates
I tried to explain to someone why I disliked the missions on RDR2 and they didn’t get it. The missions reminded me that I was playing a game, I just wanted to explore and hunt.
2 - Updated subspace - it was the level of competition and community that made that game amazing in the 90s.
3 - Civilization like civ 1 but updated with newer graphics/tech tree also the ability to be much more complex but only if you want to. Best part of the game imho was the exploration, simple but enjoyable tech tree and expansion. The new civ games are fun but take so much time to master and engage in.
4 - FPS that can be played in large scale format but doesn't reward 14 year old reflexes and levels the playing field for experience of older people.
Video games that are easily accessible, enjoyable and don't try and keep you on platform by wasting your time on meaningless accomplishments :D
FWIW I've recently gotten an Oculus Quest 2 and I've been playing a lot of Pavlov Shack. I was afraid of the quick-reflexes, playing-all-the-time, fearsome 14 years old (and judging by their voices, there's a lot of them), but I've been doing pretty well - usually ending up with a 2:1 or 3:1 K/D ratio, top of the team table, and playing maybe an hour every other day. I'm very surprised by this, and I can't really explain it - I'm not a gamer and the last time I played an FPS seriously was before 2010. TLDR: Go get 'em!
You might like The Battle of Polytopia. Not the same but has similar vibes.
If you like your FPS games with a side of inventory management and googling around for wiki hints, have a look at Escape from Tarkov. I'd suggest watching a bunch of Pestily's content (his The Raid series on youtube) to figure out if the game is for you. IMO it rewards experience over reflexes - but may be a different kind of 'experience' from what you are interested in. Lots to learn about map layouts, ammo types, etc.
Also have a look at the new Arma game (called Arma Reforger), seems like it could be (or become, with updates) interesting.
While having quick reflexes is always a benefit, positioning and teamwork is more important in Squad.
Finding a server with consistently decent squad leaders is definitely important to get the most out of the game. If the squad lead isn't talking for more then a minute or two, leave and join another.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Watch this space, it's already decent and also OSS.
PS: One hill I will die on is games using Discord as forum/wiki like this one does. Try searching google for information about unit or something, nothing. I guess I will have to make unofficial wiki/forum one day.
I'm 40+ and play Fortnite with my son, and while I worry his gaming exposure is very heavily weighted to one game with minimal story, we have a great time working as a team and talking about strategies to maximise our chances. He's 9yo and a very strong player. I don't find reflexes to be that much of a problem, but I'm not sure how old you mean by "older"!
What I want is something where you can literally research magic, discover new effects, combine them to create new magic in form of spells, artifacts, rituals and so on. It should be easily accessible, after all it's a game, and not work. And have a bit of liberty in world interactions and movements. So maybe a easy metrovanian like Ori or Hollow knight, where you get new movements and open new paths through magic discoveries, but can decide your own difficult-level by either using some slow and safe magic in form of a ritual, or fast and dangerous by fighting directly with battle-orientated spells.
There are a bunch of games which go a bit in the direction, but are not complex and deep enough, like "Mages of Mystralia", or the Magicka-Games. Thinking about, a sandbox-environment might be the best for this, so Minecraft with some mods, or Noita would also go in the direction from a different angle.
Just the passive tree alone makes my head hurt all the time and that's just one single aspect of adjustment of your character https://poeplanner.com/
- Suveh Nux by David Fisher
- The Wand by Arthur DiBianca
FWIW I think it's a very difficult thing to create such a system, without making it a tedious exercise in testing ingredient combinations.
I haven’t thought deeply about how much RTS complexity would be appropriate - but you would want to keep the action symmetrical so nobody is ‘waiting’ around for decisions to be made.
It can be quite satisfying with an organized group, or frustrating if you're just playing with randoms.
RO2 is fairly old now but I imagine the newer games (Rising Storm/RS2) have similar mechanics.
Even after 40 or so hours I was still getting absolutely destroyed, chasing the high of kill streaks I'd gotten early on (against other new players).
Is it still active? Part of me wants to give it another try, though I know only pain and suffering awaits.
Plus Unknown Worlds has moved on to Subnautica, so all updates are Community Driven now. Which is pretty neat tbh.
A good lerk can soften up marines forever and a good fade has little reason to die while continually getting kills everytime it leaves the hive.
A good shotgun or rifle marine can cancel out 2-3 alien skulk players every wave. The skilled dominate midgame.
The end-game onos stomp and xeno ganeplay versus exo and jetpacks levels out the skill required across players and becomes more enjoyable for everyone. Though games rarely get there without demoralizing everyone midgame.
It's strange to me that the skill required peaks midgame and endgame is full of stunlock mechanics, tanky units and suicide tactics.
I would put the highest skill mechanics on display in the end game so everyone has a good time before the domination of skill kicks in.
It's still active, 4-5 servers in the US full every night and a bunch of UK, Euro and chinese servers. One aussie server.
Nothing like rolling up in an APC with 12 people in voice chat on the tip of the spear, or coordinating an entire battery of MAXs keeping the skies clear. Some of the best gaming in general I've ever experienced. Gradually, though, pay to win mechanics pushed me away, and I've not played since 2014.
The gameplay is sustainable for a little bit in terms of randoms joining servers but all that's left of NS1 and 2 are extremely niche competitive scenes that don't reach the scale of what you want and Nuclear Dawn has no playerbase. It's a nice idea and NS1 produced some of the best competitive FPS players for a few games (Quake 3/CPMA/Live, Team Fortress 2) but ultimately it lacks the fun factor needed to keep a substantial amount of people playing.
I think the overview position would need complicating factors to make it hard - otherwise they would just be frustrated at the grunt soldiers not taking objectives.
Natural Selection worked much better in that regard. About 6v6 was the sweet spot, but it worked alright on lower player counts and was absolute fun chaos at higher counts. It was a fixture at our LANs for many years!
One the best parts of these games though is that new players are always incentivized to contribute and aren't a net drag (in casual play). Sure you might be terrible, but your death still meant less damage on your teammates, and there was always something helpful to do whether it was helping build or repair things or scouting and harassing the enemy.
But does anyone else remember the Sourcemod Empires?
FPS/RTS with TANKS! And a Tech Tree!
Unfortunately the Source Engine really doesn't like tank physics.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/624970/Battlezone_Combat_...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redu...
1) Asymmetric RTS / FPS. A group of FPS players play through a map against an RTS player who is controlling the tech, types and grouping of mobs, etc.
2) RTS / FP coop game sort of like Warcraft 3 where one player controls the base from an RTS view and another player(s) control a hero and a support army.
I don't enjoy MOBA's but they are super popular. I love Starcraft but it is too hard to get into. Takes tons of time and effort to get the basics of 'how to play'.
3) I think a game somewhere between Starcraft and LOL would be interesting. Clearly it is all about the details here and I don't have them - but I think you could capture a really big gaming market by trying to simplify the macro of Starcraft, keep the micro, army movement, base building, expanding etc. Controlling and upgrading lanes of a moba map?
I have no idea how any of these would really work out from a game development point of view but I think they have potential to be a lot of fun and bring some new life into the RTS world.
> myrmi 0 minutes ago
> 1 point by AndrewOMartin 0 minutes ago
> mschulze 1 minute agor[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/Natural_Selection_2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Selection_(video_game)
One of the players is the RTS "Commander", the rest are soldiers on the ground. The commanders role is to distribute both resources and information as necessary to the soldiers.
https://www.savagexr.com/savage-the-battle-for-newerth-downl...
It was similar to what you are talking about. There was an RTS aspect with a tactical view where you ordered groups of units around, and an FPS aspect where you fought as an individual.
The gameplay was based around your tactical units being under balanced against the enemy, so you would have to choose where and how to use yourself as the superweapon to achieve the level objectives.
I was a developer on the game team which had representatives from the RTS and FPS teams (CnC and Medal of Honor). The first day you were on the team you had to play the lo-fi prototype which had the basic mechanics in place. It was frantic, exhausting, frustrating, and incredibly fun.
Obviously I can't talk about why it was cancelled, but if you look at the business environment and economy in the first couple of years after the xbox360 and ps3 were released, you can get a good idea.
I really wish that game had been finished and released as it was originally conceived.
Very disappointing.
Exploring and collecting goody huts, fighting off barbarians -> going around the idea maze trying to find product market fit
Catherine cozies up to you, then suddenly declares war and sends over a carpet of doom -> Amazon did a bunch of butt sniffing pretending to want to acquire, then decides to copy your product and launch a competitor
Chieftain level: you went to an Ivy league school, have a wealthy parent that is a partner at a Tier 1 VC, and get a free (no equity) 500k angel investment to start off
Immortal level: you are an immigrant who just arrived in US before college. You are working 2 jobs to support your parents and siblings. 1 of your parents is sick. Most of your friends are trying to get rich quick off crypto.
(don't even ask what deity level might be)
I would love to give folks the real startup experience without the risk so they can feel what it's like. I think the challenge here is figuring out what the movement and interpersonal mechanics would be: so much of building a company is about relationships. Perhaps some of it can be procedurally generated, using GPT-3 or similar models. Like when you are trying to negotiate multiple term sheets and the investors try various tactics on you.
Someone posted a vastly simplified version of this earlier: https://startuptrail.engine.is/
EDIT: if you're gonna downvote, at least explain why?
Golden age -> "oxygen is the momentum of a startup"; good culture building unlocks a bunch of superpowers of your employees (like, your growth person generates several 0 CAC strategies or your engineering team surprises you with a different platform: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/engineering-plot-twist)
Denouncements: Ryan Breslow accuses you of being part of the Stripe mafia on Twitter
A) Build a sweet game engine for exploring and discovering landscapes, topologies, biomes, plants and animal species, etc. Maybe even hunting and survival?
B) Take on the EA Sports (it's in the game) model and update the game with only minor changes to trails and other recent events, but use the margins to fund the park service!
C) Help incorporate trail mapping and maintenance into the engine, so people can have fun taking the game back to reality
D) Release expansions with new areas to help grow the platform, but also teach people about the various locales
E) Over time, watch how parts of our earth change, how we impact it, and use the game engine as a solid digital archive
This -> TTheirs
Help -> Themlp
Clients is a masculine term in French use CliThems.
Minus 15 social credits.
Kind of makes me think of an open-world, never-ending Firewatch. Or, make a Journey style Appalachian Trail simulator.
1. a high res VR experience for the less-able folks to experience this beautiful place, and
2. an AR glasses experience that narrates the trails as I walk it, where I can walk up to any plant and ID it, overlays that name all the peaks and valleys, narration about local fauna and sustainability.
So for example take any zacklike, one thing I'd like to try is having something like those mechanisms drove the supply of goods in an in-game economy, which would then feed in as input into other systems.
Well any complex system as the input would do =)...
So I've spent a lot of times tinkering with economic simulation games, the tricky thing is making them fun / balanced. I'm still trying to work out nice ways of debugging them when they break / become unstable. A lot of it at the moment is plotting data over time to see where failure points occur.
Relatively few options to act upon, lots of data with ambiguous lagging and leading indicators.
In fact I'd even be interested in just a mod for an existing business sim like a SimCity/Anno1800 where you could get loans based rates and consumer demand was in response to central bank activities.
Actually just found that OpenTTD seems to have some of this but haven't played it yet as the graphics are a bit retro for my taste. But maybe I'll take look.
- [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...
- [1]: Which I vaguely remember he discusses in his GDC talk, "Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns ": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I
I'm creating Archapolis, a city builder game. Handling the micro economy is a far off goal. But one aspect of the game I want to implement on the macro scale is charging ~30% more for utilities and goods imported into the city.
So one of the goals of the player is help grow the businesses they want. This helps the budget in three ways:
- Collecting corporate tax
- Collecting sales tax
- Higher margins on goods
For anything that is imported, they city loses potential income by not being able to tax corporate and lower profit margins
I'm currently working on path finding right now, and I've got a tech demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
Feedback is really important to me. I'm aiming for a Venn diagram that captures what I want and what the users want.
I'm more interested in trying to get economic behaviours modelled in a nice way where the system responds to shocks and responding to the varying behaviour of it's agents.
If you have some nice ways of approaching / thinking about this, I'd love to hear them =)...
You can reply here or ping me an email.
But I am going to be covering this at a goods level.
- [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/208520/Omerta__City_of_Ga...
- [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1386780/City_of_Gangsters...
That's not the same as an economy, yes, you have logistics chains and production lines and yes, they affect each other. However, it's not a shared space and I think that leads to a very different gameplay experience.
But yes, Factorio is definitely the canonical example of the game in its space.
E.g., ghost 1: pick up ore, throw ore -> ghost 2: catch ore, crush ore, throw crushed ore -> ghost 3: put ore into furnace -> ghost 4: pick up metal bar, throw metal bar, etc..
Then the player is running around building interactable buildings with produced resources and that oh so satisfying factory spaghetti starts forming.
Edit: The Last Clockwinder https://store.steampowered.com/app/1755100/The_Last_Clockwin...
Support indie devs making cool stuff like this!
1. A true large scale battle game, kind of like what Hell Let Loose is, but for knights, samurai, spartans, Persian Immortals, and any number of other warriors throughout history. Each has their own skill tree and strategies, you can control troop movements on the battlefield, and become an individual warrior and enter the fray. You can pick a 'campaign mode' which consists of conquering surrounding civilizations, or make the setting a historically significant battlefield like Thermopylae.
2. A spy rpg, where you follow the life of a CIA case officer, or KGB operative. Kind of like what Sam Fisher did with Splinter Cell, but those games missed out on big aspects of spycraft, like developing assets and constructing a spy network for intelligence gathering.
3. A good surfing game. I love surfing and have done it most of my life, but I haven't happened across a video game that does a good job capturing what surfing is like. They either make the surfer impossible to unseat from their board, or make every wave teetering on the edge of wiping out. I know water physics are hard in games but I keep holding my breath a game studio gets it right.
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/508440/Totally_Accurate_B...
No long, enforced intermissions between rounds.
Escape key works for all interstitial screens.
People can run their own servers.
Free to mod.
Basically, nearly every new game enforces how the player plays beyond just mechanizing the play. For instance, in Overwatch at the end of the game there are highlights. If you leave the highlights and queue again, you aren't actually in the queue until the highlights play out in your previous game.
Sure, each of the games breaking these rules may claim success, but this thread is about what I wish existed. It seems like a lot of games with these features used to exist (running my own server, mods/maps, etc...) and we've lost something.
You would find a sever close to your location with a low ping and casually game in the evenings. At least 1/2 of the sever population were regulars. Modding was simple and encouraged. No DLCs.
I feel like I grew up during the golden age of gaming and my kids won’t get the same experience.
That used to be true, but it has not been the case for a couple of years now.
No board game has yet exploited the fact that everyone has a smart phone in their pocket. There are social mobile games and mobile clones of board games, but their are no games that exploit the power of the ubiquitous mobile phone to create an otherwise impossible in-person board game. The closest game designers have come to this is games like Pokemon Go, but Pokemon Go is not a SBG because it does not rely on player-to-player interaction that requires high-fidelity virtual reality or face-to-face play.
Here are some capabilities SBG's will give game designers:
- Implement complex probabilistic behavior, cause and effect relationships, and scoring
- Accelerate game play by automating score keeping and timekeeping
- Parallelize game play by allowing simultaneous turn-taking
- Reveal certain information to certain players with high granularity
- Allow players to communicate or transact with other players without revealing which player they are interacting with
- Persist detailed game state between game sessions
- Procedural world and character generation
I believe that SBG's will inevitably develop into a rich, hugely varied genre of board games that largely displaces traditional board games, but to my knowledge there isn't a single example commercially available at this time.
The core challenge of designing a compelling SBG will be to exploit the capabilities of the smart phone while simultaneously keeping players focused on the face-to-face interactions that give board games their timeless appeal.
Yes indeed, this is huge. I'm thinking of you, Through the Ages, with your incredibly fiddly and easy to make mistakes in upkeep rules. Our first few run throughs were pretty much ruined because someone made an early mistake in their favor that snowballed over time. Imagine if everyone had an iPad in place of their game board that would largely eliminate mistakes.
Similarly, back when Dominion came out, there were some online servers where you could play (I believe they were mostly shut down), and it was such a nicer experience because you didn't have to spend all of your time reshuffling your deck.
I'd love to see SBGs as you've described them, though. Something beyond party games for this format would be nice.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/279537/search-planet-x
Players make guesses on their phone and only they know the result
The base game should actually be quite limited in scope, but if the idea takes off, additional levels and challenges (rather than gear and talents) will be added. Eventually a game like this should grown in depth only, adding nothing but intresting generators and randomized encounters, and enemies. Because otherwise you end up inflating good gear and talent progression, and there is only so many ways you can honestly make a +1 Weapon before it just becomes another +1 Weapon, but its green.
Sword Coast Stratagems (radically improves AI, making mages especially terrifying), INSANE difficulty Double Damage (only damage dealt to your party is doubled) No Reload ("hard core" mode. No save scrumming).
These combinations turn the game into a strategically deep, and tactically rich experience. And just the hell more memorable.
I don't think what it's you're looking for, but I do think it is an incredible game, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in it.
[0] https://www.downwellgame.com/
Like say you have one game that's 7PM-9PM three times a week for a length of three months. Sort of like how you might schedule a Dungeons and Dragons game, but a bit more frequently and with the benefits of online play and other computer things, whether they be physics, scale, graphics, mechanics, customization with material impact, etc.
That way there's no real penalty for joining late, you can just play the next game or find a game with a different schedule that's closer to the beginning, or do multiple games at once. Also perhaps hidden goals that can give you a bonus towards your next game, but they would only carry over for one game.
Space Station 13 does some of this with one hour scheduled games, but I'm thinking something halfway between that and an MMO.
A first person mosquito simulator, where you fly around in teams, suck blood and also can upgrade your mosquito. Hiding in a sneaky sort of way together with sinister music should be a central part of the game. The annoying buzzing sound should not be on by default, but be possible as part of a future mosquito upgrade. If it's on a level with many humans, it could be on the form of "capture the flag" or counter strike, but where a designated subset of the humans would need to be sucked blood from, and then the first team to lay eggs in water and spawn new mosquitos would win. There should be no ranged weapons, but a way to zoom in and jet forward once a target lock was acquired. The upgrades should belong to the account, but only some should be possible to select at the start of a level, according to how many "upgrade points" a level has. One NPC squatter that tried to squish mosquitos should be controlled by an AI and placed in each level. The mosquito upgrades could be pretty extensive, from "supersonic" to "jet pack" or "hurricane force blood suction". Victory dances of the mosquitos and the music should also be part of the upgrades. Money should be made by selling the game for $2 and by selling hats in game for $0.5 each.
Never played it but heard it was frustrating. Even the trailer suggests it's not easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGz8_F03t8c
I do remember being a bit frustrated.
I want a game that actually reinforces the social fabric instead of simulates it. Something that encourages people to be together in the physical world (gasp!), have fun, have shared experiences/goals/challenges, and form lasting friendships.
I have very fond memories of lugging my computer (and CRT!) to my friends/family's house to have a LAN + pizza party. The best part for me wasn't necessarily the game itself. The games were fun but I really enjoyed the social aspect of talking about a tough dungeon or strategizing how to beat a challenging opponent.
It seems like the industry is trying its best to bring people into a simulated world but why not use games to bring people together into it instead?
Pokemon Go is probably the closest thing to this I've seen recently but the core gameplay was unfortunately pretty boring when it first started and became popular.
As technologists we have a tendency to want to build our own world instead of integrate into the real world. It's understandably easier/cleaner, but it strips out all the richness of the real world.
That’s kinda what The Jackbox Party Pack games are designed for. Think Pictionary, but you doodle from your phone and it shows up on your TV and there’s nothing to clean up.
Search for games supporting local multiplayer in steam, then look them up on https://www.co-optimus.com/ to see how many players they support.
City builder: major construction projects take time, from planning to construction. Construction itself can be very disruptive, causing local negative effects and necessitating temporary arrangements. Another aspect is that developments that were once nice and shiny grow old and withered. In a long running city you should be able to recognize how different areas are from different eras, eventually some stuff becoming "historic" and valued for that reason.
RPG: In many games apocalypse patiently waits while our hero rescues every kitten from a tree and clears every basement from spiders. That makes decisions in game feel less weighty because often there is no cost for doing things. I would want to see a game where you'd really need to weigh if things are worth doing, not just in regards to players time but also in regards to in-game time. Tyranny (by Obsidian) was one game that kinda pretended to have this, but it was pretty weak illusion in practice.
It lacks some of your "buildings decay" ideas, though. So not quite 1-1 with what you're suggesting.
In Unsighted, every character (including the player) has a finite lifetime remaining. You find items that can temporarily extend any player's lifetime, including your own, but it is very difficult to finish the game before any character dies. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062110/UNSIGHTED/
Maybe start simple with 2D maps - “your goal is to spot Russian ships within 100 miles of the US East Coast, where do you put some number of DF listening posts?”. Then maybe introduce topology - “how do you detect ships intruding in these Norwegian fjords, given the mountains of varying heights?”, etc.
But combat isn't the only mechanic that could be present there. There are examples like Ori and Toki where combat is de-emphasized in favor of movement/puzzles, but they're still 2D platformers.
I want to see a metroidvania game based on racing. I enjoy driving/racing games and would like to see those mechanics provide the micro-challenges for a metroidvania. Boss fights would be setpiece races, earning XP would be small things like a time trials, stunts, or precision driving. Unlocks like drifts, speed boosts, etc.
Have you tried Speedrunners? It's a platform racing game, though that's all it is. Not really a Metroidvania.
It was a swords'n'sorcery style adventure with a big open world, in which you had a party of adventurers.
Every week you'd fill in a card with what 10-20 actions you wanted to take (go exploring/questing, pray to gods, hire people, buy equipment, etc.), and post off your form.
Then you'd receive a printout with the results of your actions the following week.
I'd love a modern online version of this, i.e. something that limits you to taking a few actions a day or every few days, but with a serious amount of depth underneath it, many players, living worlds, etc.
The thing I remember most is looking forward to receiving many pages of printouts each week with all sorts of neat details and descriptions of everything that happened and the world around me.
The pacing and fact that it was text-based made me pay a lot more attention to everything that I would for a graphically based game.
It looks like there's an online version [1] still going in a couple of different variants.
[1] : http://www.kjcgames.com/quest/quest.htm
The website, navigation and forms also feel very appropriately 'dated', in kind of funny and painful ways...
I would put in that list:
Sea of Thieves -> to play only with friends (no PvP)
Battlefield <X> -> to mod and fool around with my friends
Overwatch -> to train, mod, etc.
Star Citizen -> aside from the usual "when the game will be released" let us run our little servers!!
I am sure I am forgetting obvious ones in this list...
Please make games "hostable" and "moddable"! <3
Like as a city builder you suddenly have to deal with people doing illegal car races through your city putting your citizens in danger, or dealing with gang wars from a GTA style game, but from a more macro perspective. Having real people playing MORPGs visiting your city looking for things to do. And so on.
No idea how you would make that work, but I find the possibilities quite interesting.
ive been whiteboarding something similar to this. My scope is geared more towards round-based game loops rather than entire world building but I think the technical implementation would be very similar.
I think there's a lot of potential in connecting traditionally single-player activities, so the core game loops work well without depending on a lot of people being online like MMO's.. but it still benefits greatly from having more people on, so it has snowball potential.
Something I had in mind (which this thread has showed me wasnt original haha) was like an RTS and FPS 1+5 v 1+5 mix. There is a typical 1v1 RTS match against an opponent, and then in the middle of the war is a 5v5 FPS match. The FPS players and RTS players are not sharing any win conditions, but are on same teams. for example, fps players might be confined to a subsection of the RTS map
I kept getting hung up on creating meaningful interaction. It seems like a really cool feature to me, if it could be developed for free.. but i couldnt find a way to justify having a less polished version of either of the game types without the interaction becoming too dominant. In other words, if my gameplay isnt really impacted by the other game types then im just playing a worse version of some game. Alternatively, if it significantly impacted by the other game modes - i become dependent on things far outside my control.
this tension might actually relax a lot by moving out of the context of round-based games and into a persistent world-building context, but that scale / scope is also significantly larger too.
- Manage energy, waste, air, soil, water, food production.
- Build and expand your colony above and below ground.
- Manufacture robots, rockets, tools, everything your colony needs.
- Keep your population healthy through infection, virus, disease outbreaks.
- Control immigration/emigration policies to optimize skills and capabilities.
- Explore the planet and gain scientific skills and funding.
- Declare independence from earth and fight a war if you so choose.
Expansion packs: spread your empire to space, asteroids, and other planets. Basically The Expanse but in an RTS.
I (was going to say personally, but actually this is exactly what O'Neil said) find Mars settlement to be an unpleasant pipe dream compared with these options.
But, in the context of a game, Mars might be more fun.
ONI is a 2D (from the side) base / colony builder where you keep a bunch of workers alive. They need oxygen, food, shelter and sanitation, and a whole bunch of optional things.
You, as a player, can only tell what needs to be done. The workers will do it (whenever they feel like). You can prioritize jobs, and you can prioritize tasks per worker. (I.e. you want one to build, one to cook, etc)
Workers that are happy can take on more complex jobs. Workers become more happy if more needs are met, or with better quality (e.g. better food, nice bed, nice bedroom, nice place to eat, long breaks, good sleep)
You can automate a lot of things, but they’re all pretty hard. The game has pretty high difficulty and will be a constant challenge. There are many ways to solve specific problems, all with distinct advantages and disadvantages.
There are, for example, literally 10s of different ways to get food for your workers, plant based, animal based, or mixed. Animals require other resources (eg plants). The plants and animals usually have distinct requirements, like they need the environment to be hot or cold, or they need specific kind of food/fertilizer/water. The plants and animals will usually also produce some kind of resource. For example, there’s a type of animal that eats iron ores and poops refined iron, or one that consumes carbon dioxide and poops coal. There’s an animal that likes to live in a room filled with Hydrogen that will grow plastic fur, but it still needs oxygen to breath (so you need a room that has both hydrogen and oxygen in a certain balance)
The animals are all… creative.
All machines produce heat, so your base will very slowly heat up until you setup active cooling (which is a huge challenge). You can cool down the air you produce (oxygen) before it’s being circulated, or you can cool down the machines, or you can move the machines away from the base (somewhere isolated).
Some things require very cold environments or very hot. Some chemical processes require you to heat up a room or floor to over 400C, while food can be preserved near indefinitely in a room of carbon dioxide at -21C. (But workers can’t breathe in there so they better not get stuck in there).
You can create steam power plants by building steel rods into magma and cooling these rods with water, but have fun trying to keep your steam at reasonable temperatures because if uncontrolled your steam will be over 1000C and will certainly break something and escape your steam room and spread everywhere, destroying or killing anything on its path before condensing into water again.
Many of these processes require specific materials that can resist or transfer heat easily, or insulate heat, or doesn’t easily melt. Some materials are hard to get, or require starting new colonies on other planets, or require mining “ore fields” with rockets. (DLC content)
You can choose what materials to use in many buildings. For example, you can have a heat pump made of iron, but it will overheat very quickly so cooling it will be hard. You can make a heat pump out of steel, so it’s much easier to deal with but steel is harder to produce (it requires resources gathered that comes in low quantities inside eggs, or can be dug up from deep biomes which are very hot and will kill your workers without protection)
A code is entered. Everything goes white, then off-white. A bit of orange sky and ground shows up. Sand. There is sand everywhere, on the ground and in the sky. It would get in your eyes, if you had eyes. The sand is blowing and going everywhere.
Something black slowly emerges beneath the blowing sand. It's fixed in the ground like a black hatch. As more sand blows a little more of the black hatch is revealed. There are tiny lines and squares not quite visible on the surface of the hatch. It's not a hatch at all. It's a solar panel buried in the sand.
Days pass, and just enough sunlight filters through, and magically somewhere below a machine has come to life. It has activated itself. It is unknown how long the machine has been buried beneath the sand.
Within a few weeks, the machine is visible. It is only partially buried. You have a choice. There are controls on the machine. It is not just a machine but appears to be a vehicle as well. Forward, left, right and reverse are the basic controls. You press forward and a gentle whirring noise starts, but the machine is stuck in the sand. You press reverse and the entire vehicle jiggles a bit but nothing more.
Maybe back and forth? You toggle between pressing forward and reverse. And, after a bit of this the machine starts to move a little more than jiggle. But, it slows. You've used a little too much power. A few more weeks pass and you can try again.
The batteries or whatever is powering this unit seem to be very low. But, you try again anyways to wiggle the machine out from being stuck in the sand. There really is no one else around. The sky, the ground, the sand, and this little vehicle with a solar panel on top of it. Today the machine seems to move a little more. And, over the weeks of recharging, more of the sand has blown away. You notice one other smaller button off to the side of the main movement controls. You press it, and an elaborate console appears.Most games with an economy I've played are either of the type that the economy doesn't really matter and is more of a tacked on feature, it is a thinly veiled idle game, or you are the only entity the economy exists for or is controlled by. All of these lower the depth of the experience to a point where it's not fun for long.
I guess what I wish existed would be a merchant type game with a strong economy, and many entities competing to take their bite out of it, you just being one of those. Tycoon type games don't really scratch the same itch for some reason.
A factorio-like economy game would be incredible. Maybe Factorio + Off World Trading Company + Patrician.
1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.
How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.
2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did something along those lines.
Outer Wilds too, although in quite a different way.
2) this is a mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, when you die you can turn the time back to the moment before death.
To my Portal idea the closest I’ve found was Superliminal. There’s something wrong with the graphics though, it makes me nauseous to play.
But I will definitely check out your suggestions! Thanks again!
Available on steam or direct.
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Shameless self plug, but I am currently working on a time-traveling puzzle game called Loop Thesis (https://loop-thesis.com) which features a completely internally consistent simulation of time that's constantly running during the entire game.
All of the time travel mechanics are emergent from that simulation, nothing is faked -- and the game takes that to an absurd degree, even the way levels are stored in memory is consistent with the core mechanics that the game teaches the player about time travel.
The point of having that kind of obsessive consistency is that the game is trying to feel almost like a textbook; when you understand the core mechanics of how the simulation works, if you think of something that you should be able to do, it works even if I didn't pre-plan it as a designer, because you're not interacting with a set of hard-coded puzzles, you're interacting with a simulation, and the rules you're learning are actually the simulation's rules, not an abstraction of them. It's meant to capture this joy of finding a complicated system and just kind of systematically picking it apart and then putting it back together again.
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The game also supports multiplayer (although I'm not planning on including that at launch), and the multiplayer runs on the same simulation. That means that if player 1 goes back in time, player 2 stays when they are; you can have someone in the past making changes that affect the future, and it all just kind of... works. It's a really trippy experience, at least so far in playtests.
And that obsession about internal consistency also means that modding tools work pretty well. The game's core engine is really fun to play with because you can just kind of change variables and build little tools and just see what happens. A couple of puzzles have come out of me just kind of noticing something weird happening, and then realizing that there's a consequence in the simulation that I didn't originally plan and then building a puzzle out of it. So I'm hoping that beyond the game itself that modders and level designers will have some fun building new mechanics.
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It's a top-down pixel-graphics puzzle game (not 1st person, sorry), and still in very early development, even though most of the core timeline engine is finished and I'm mostly at this point just fleshing out content and doing a bunch of work around that engine. The website (https://loop-thesis.com) is also horribly out of date, but I'll be starting up full-time development on it again soon, so I'm hoping to have more updates at some unspecified point in the future.
2. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
In one of the versions of this game I thought it would be interesting to have a cutthroat stock market involved. I'm not sure how the mechanics would have to work but you could use the stock market mechanics to lift and destroy other companies.
We could start from a small industry, e.g logging, then gradually introduce downstream products and AI consumers.
Stock market could certainly be introduced later, but I don't think it's necessary for first version.
The idea was that there's a time limited map (usually 2 months) and players team up as a faction. A faction could own land, paid through in-game money earned by mining ores. Blocks inside your land couldn't be modified by non-factions players, but you could give special permissions if needed. The hardcore part was that every death of any member of your faction would decrease some power value and once that crossed below zero, your land protection was gone and your base was usually grieved instantly. So there was always a thrill of going outside. There were a bunch of server wide events that encouraged going outside and gave you in-game rewards.
What made this server special was the permissions mentioned before in combination of everything minecraft, and especially redstone, made possible. We build all kinds of special contraptions live banking vaults, slot machines, trading machines and a lot more. That was in stark contrast of most other factions that focused mostly on PvP. In later maps be earned enough reputation and were usually not touched by major PvP factions. The combination of hostile environment and the ability to be really creative thanks to minecraft was great. In case anyone read all that, here's the bases we build: https://hcfluffy.de/bases/
There was one where if you died, you got banned for 48 hours. In another, if you died, you got banned for the rest of the month, which made it suck to die in the first few days of the month.
Despite PVP and griefing being allowed, most noob deaths were from starvation.
Our main objective for all maps was actually to build a somewhat safe place where noobs could get free food on automated machines. You can see the signs on the page I linked :)
As an aside, I enjoyed Civ4 way more than 5/6. They might have hexes and Civ4 (and earlier) may suffer from the Stack of Doom problem but I don't enjoy the dance of units that can no longer stack.
Anyway, I played Civ4 the most (other than Civ1) of the series but, more than the base game, I played way more of FFH2. It's an amazing mod. Sadly, the primary creator went on to work for some other game company. Good for him but not I miss the development.
There were a lot of groundbreaking and amazing turn-based fantasy games in the 1990s and early 2000s. FFH2 is just one (and a notable one at that). Others include Heroes of Might and Magic (primary 2 and 3) and Master of Magic (I believe there was a kickstarter for a successor to this but I don't believe it was well received? I could be wrong).
I don't enjoy RTSs. I like the relaxing pace of turn-based games.
Or be like the forums hounds who play 1 turn a day and analyze EVERYTHING.
Personally I would move to Tabletop games (or Boardgames). They're much better designed for short turns with interactivity so there's minimal downtime for players getting bored.
That being said, if you're looking for Civ5 but on mobile with Multiplayer, UnCiv is a FOSS project for Android, PC, Linux, and Mac w/ Java. Moderately vibrant MP community on the Discord.
I also find the game's aesthetic to be a dissonant mess. While I can put up with a more cartoony style, the UI is just too busy. Not only are there a ton of icons and labels on the screen, it was like the designers wanted to emphasize the civilization's colors rather than readability. The map looks strange because of how cities, mountains, wonders, and district buildings are scaled for visibility. Individual buildings look bigger than cities and appear as tall as some mountains or larger than some terrain features. Overall, the game seems to lack a cohesive and congruent style and it's ugly to me.
All that being said, I did like the variety for city state bonuses, having great people be more diversified, and the fact that needing a specific tile to place a wonder upon made it so that a small number of cities did not contain an absurd amount of wonders within them. Ultimately, I hope they make Civ 7 a more streamlined game but keep some of the variety.
When they're first released there tends to be a lot of issues and gaps. Subsequent expansions tend to fill out those gaps. The expansions for Civ4 added a lot, for example.
I played at least 100 hours of Civ6 but honestly it didn't grab me. One issue (and this is a general issue with Civ games) is I tended to avoid war because it would totally bog down. A protracted war (if, say, you're going for a Domination victory) might take 3 full days to play (ignoring early Domination wins).
Anyway, I haven't played a ton of Civ6 since the expansions so can't comment on the current state. I know there are a few diehard fans online who stick to Civ5. I played less of Civ5 so have no opinion on 5 vs 6.
Civ6 does have some weirdness I wish it didn't (and maybe it's been fixed?). For example the price for creating districts is determined when you first create them so it's optimal to create them all early, cancel production and then build them much later to lock in a low price. I don't like this kind of micro-optimization being rewarded (even necessaary on higher difficulty levels).
But: the AI is dim-witted, especially in war; there is too little random chance; and combat tends to favor the defender. So once you get through the early game, you don't have to be afraid of your neighbors declaring war on you.
In contrast, in Civ 1 combat was all-or-nothing, and the weaker unit had a reasonable chance of winning. If a rival caught you unprepared then you were totally screwed. Conversely if the AI pulled ahead you could still get lucky and win. There was an element of suspense to the game that was just magic.
Unstacking both units and the cities has made a very different game now from the original Civilization Games.
If you're still on Civ5, might I recommend the Vox Populi mod? Really improves everything across the board.
Basically I would love a game where players HAVE TO cooperate. The cooperation happens by having players playing different gameplays.
For instance, but, keep in mind that this is just ONE example: there's a war to fight, some players are drivers, some are fighters, some are medics...But also some players are in offices doing strategy stuff or logistics stuff, etc.
Of course, one could say: "you can have that in Arma 3 or Foxhole" and that's kinda true...but I don't know, there's something missing: A lore, a story, a universe to feel part of...
Plus, the game I am imagining, does NOT have to be a simulation or "complex gaming" at all! It could be kinda-casual without being too simple either: like For The King.
So in my ideal version of the game I am thinking about players play actually VERY DIFFERENT gameplays but cooperate in order to achieve common goals. Some of the players have to interact, some of the players don't. But in any case, everyone's actions will impact everybody else.
To sum it up: I would love a game with: Persistent universe + very asymmetric gameplay + cooperation as a key factor of success
But the game would be without: Grinding, farming, loot boxes, meaningless quests, basically a game where you don't have to redo the same things on and on to grind 128points of experience or reputation or obtain one piece of loot that does not fit your equipment set.
If you think this game already exists: do not hesitate to tell me :)
Overcooked I think is the best example of this genre. Super simple gameplay mechanic basically 2 actions and move. But all the fun and complexity comes in from needing to work with other people.
There is a major distinction in my mind between that type of actual collaboration and many “co-op” games where you are basically just playing at the same time and usually actually competing for kills/points.
But surely as an element of gameplay the symmetric disarming of a bomb is super fun :)
On www.a.com players build dungeons that are attacked by AI. On www.b.com players attack AI generated dungeons.
What neither players of a nor b know is that they are playing against eachother. But both are amazed by the AI. And there's none of the drama usually involved in anything pvp.
Try Eco: Description at beginning of podcast episode here: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/brad-will-made-a-tech-pod/79-...
On the combat only front, Hell Let Loose. In a single tank, just driving or gunning in the tank is a full time job for one player. There is also a tank commander who keeps situational awareness and communicates up to higher level officers. Those officers get the information and make high level goals, they are generally just looking a map and not running around doing much in person.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/Natural_Selection_2/
Like Starry Night in Minecraft [1], imaginary castles [2], Magica Voxel scenes [3] and a good chunk of DeviantArt and ArtStation material.
I'd love to be able to go in and explore these creations by walking, flying or being taken on a tour and just gaping at things. No other goal but just to stare and to be amazed.
But it's all gotta be a single experience, seamlessly connected to allow going from one "world" to another with no effort. And do, of course, charge an entrance fee for this, it's only fair.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/uvpkiz/i_built_s...
Set in the Neolithic- Bronze Age, roughly (but historical accuracy is not a top priority). Like Civ, you have units which can explore the map, fight, build. But the scale is smaller: there are seasons, weather, turns last <1 month instead of hundreds of years. There’s less of an emphasis on technological progress and more on training up the skills of your Units. Units have Skill Trees corresponding to their type / class / profession, and can equip different weapons and armor (produced in your cities) for further boosts, like an rpg. Learning to hunt, gather, farm etc. Competition with other civilizations exists but more so you’re trying to survive the environment— animals, weather, nomadic raiders. Resource management is more explicit— instead of tiles producing Food every Turn at a given rate they produce some lump sum Wheat only when Harvested by a unit, say, which you must then store for the winter. Etc.
I’m working on making such a game, but it’s not my full time job and I have other projects catching my interest too, so the going is slow.
Many hours on that as a kid since it came free with the distro of Linux I had access to at the time. Good memories. I got into pixel art from trying to contribute something to the project (most of it was rejected, haha).
Part of the idea was that each player would never see the absolute coordinates of any star or another player’s names for anything, so it would be nearly impossible for two players, talking outside the game, to figure out if they were allies or enemies in game.
What killed it was that players basically had to be able to send free form messages in game, to handle the complexity of negotiations this situation would require, but it would be far too easy and rewarding for two players to just share an email address, which would allow FTL communications and break the game. The only effective solution was a human GM filtering every message, which was awkward when the timing of message delivery was THE core mechanic.
So, allow players to communicate in real-time, but it costs time and resources to set it up, and maybe near the end of the tech tree.
FWIW, there was an old Star Wars Rebellion game that did something like this. It was pretty cool. It came out in the late 90s IIRC.
I have played "I expect you to die" 1 and 2 on Oculus and it has been so amazing and fun. Had some fun with two other escape room games but neither were as polished as I expect you to die.
There is zero replayability with these games but I would happily pay a couple of bucks a month for a fresh level every week. Kind of like a TV series but for a game.
These days I'm more interested in story-heavy, all single-player, occasionally borderline pretentious games, whose story is sufficiently compelling to distract from what the outside world (US-based, for me) has become.
I've heard good things, but I've only played the voiced-over version of DE - I'm not sure if I'd be down to read everything, and the different voice actors really add another layer
Unfortunately the last update to DE introduced a very annoying audio stutter (they're supposedly trying to get it fixed)
Disco's world is depressing, but because the world is so dark, any light in the game stands out so much more. It's depressing world make good people in it and any small kindness matter.
Also disco is more of a slice of life while the plot of torment though still incredibly dark is more epic. Disco bleeds immersion. But to achieve it they stripped out pretty much all the fantasy elements out of the setting and story. Torment manages to achieve immersion while at the same time making the setting more epic and fantasmic then anything you've ever even seen. The writing and setting is better then basically almost every fantasy novel out there.
In fact Disco reads more like a contemporary novel then it does fantasy or sci-fi. Torment is grounded in fantasy but it's dark and gritty enough that it doesn't feel fake like the final fantasy games. I would say it lies somewhere in between a standard bioware RPG and Disco.
Edit: come to think of it, some of the Lucasarts remasters are well worth revisiting. I went through the cleaned-up Grim Fandango some time ago & it was a lovely break.
If you like Point & Click Adventures then there are also many "newer" entries that are worth looking at. Primordia [0] (2012 so not that new, but the Linux port is) and Strangeland [1] are my favorites from the ones I have recently played.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/227000/Primordia/ [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369520/Strangeland/
Describing it vaguely, it's an archaeology knowledge-puzzle played over a tiny solar system, in one of the most immersive first-person mechanics I've ever seen.
It's (for me) the most brilliant game ever made, both mechanically and the story. It will also scratch your space travel bug a bit.
A Roman-period detective-ish story with some fantasy elements (which I won't spoil here, but it's not as much a big deal to be spoiled as my previous recommendation of Outer Wilds), and some pretty good voice acting and character animations, especially if you consider the size of the team that made it!
They really went all-in with the Roman theme, from what I understand the depiction of society of the period is rather accurate given its overall plot, and it quite feels like you're there, and not in a Roman-themed theme park or something.
It's not really what you're asking for, but IMO it's lots of fun and young ones can get very creative in the level editor.
+ fill in a personal database device (see: Pokedex, mobiglass) to collect knowledge of and record 'sightings' of real plants, real animals, elements, chemicals, reactions, etc.
+ NPCs/locations with trivia challenges/minigames (main character name in Moby Dick, years during which the first world war occurred, etc.), plus a library to look stuff up in
+ type in what you want to do (ala certain early adventure games) like "heal forearm cut", "fish for walleye", "search for raspberries" = typing practice, spelling {although since almost no games seem to do this anymore, maybe it's just obnoxious and poor design}
There's a balance between fun and education like you see in kids shows, for example the main characters might be working through how to free a frozen monkey with something hot, while they just flew from their hometown to antarctica in mere seconds. I have to figure out how to show "this is true" and "this is fun".
I didn't care for the endless RPG grind so much - it was really the graphics and soundtrack that made such a lasting impression. Cute monsters, cute characters, cute equipment, cute maps, cute music, everything was just cute and relaxing, but still with a distinct flair that made it not feel uninspired and saccharine. I still have some of their BGM tracks in my playlists.
It's been a very successful game, too. Although outside of Korea it mostly died out long ago, in Korea it's still one of the most popular games. The global servers are mostly deserted, but when I managed to hop on the Korean server a couple years back, I was shocked to see that it was packed.
Despite its enduring success, to this day, its aesthetic is still completely unique. Other popular games have had tons of clones (some of which have overtaken the original), but somehow no one's ever made another Maplestory.
Ever since reading Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth as a kid, I've thought some elements of that story would make a great game. The player plays an archaeologist in the distant future trying to unravel the mysteries of humanity's origins -- a galaxy-scale adventure of exploration and discovery where a rich tapestry of future history is slowly revealed. As a bonus, such a game could be very positive and not even require violence like many other games. :)
It's lower scale (single solar system instead of galactic), and it's definitely based on lower-tech civilization trying to understand dead, higher-tech civilization rather than trying to uncover long-last past of your own species, though.
I also get the impression that the 1986 game Starflight may have a little bit of this, but I've only barely started playing.
Try 'Heaven's Vault' it's almost exactly what you want.
I'll also echo the Outer Wilds recommendation.
I know it's utterly unworkable. But I want it anyway.
Imagine an RTS game that ... just keeps going. Both in time and in play area. Something like the Minecraft map in scale.
You play a few hours online with other people, log off, come back, and then you're still playing on the same map with the same resources, buildings, and units. Other people may have advanced and tech'd up, and now you can too.
I have no idea how to handle combat when a player is sleeping or making dinner. Or any other real conflicts. Maybe a timer of some sort? Maybe catching them sleeping is part of the fun?
But there is war waging back and forth the planetary map, 24/7. Well it was like this when I played, I have no idea what changed since then.
After a while, the constant back-and-forth appeared kinda meaningless though. First it was amazing being part of some coordinated move to take over 2/3 of the map, but the next day it was all gone and the cycle repeated itself.
Once you get the pattern, it is still fun of course, but the fascination wears off pretty quick, honestly.
Fun game.
I read a great interpretation that Planetside is Valhalla and those are all warriors battling in eternity like they would.
In Age of Empires you can share control, so 4 people can be controlling the same civilization, even giving conflicting orders. This could be done for for when people log off.
Several factions continuously battling over discrete territories. There would be calculations throughout the day that would give certain bonuses to whichever factions were winning.
Every territory had a field commander that could request people join that had leveled up certain types of units based on how the battle was evolving.
There was also a form of player controlled government in each faction that could choose bonuses and allocate resources to various battles.
It was really cool for its moment in time.
That takes me down memory lane. Years ago (around 2007), on an Athlon XP with 2GB RAM, we had the game server for a 2000+ unit C&C clone running. We also had the ability for AI to take over once someone disconnects. We even built our own binary protocol generator (think Protobuf) so that our Java Applet client could connect to the C++ server.
And then I accidentally became CEO of a startup. My friends finished university and then started working. And we all kinda forgot about it.
EDIT: My 3ds skills around 2007: https://imgur.com/a/AhfoKNs
You get to play out storylines from Jersey Shore, with original voice actors. Mini-games include gymming, tanning, laundry, making food when you get back from the club. Missions at the club.
[GTA 6 - So Many Side Hustles]
You play as a struggling human, trying to scrape together a living by picking up jobs from various apps on your phone. Maybe you're doing some kind of Task Rabbit mission, or plain food delivery. Maybe you're delivering something else. Maybe on foot, maybe on a bike.
It should be an open world exploration in a dense urban environment and many, many different ways to be exploited.
- Hunter Hunted (asymmetric multiplayer platformer-shooter with vs. and co-op modes)
- Perfect Dark (FPS with lots of multiplayer modes, including co-op campaign, campaign versus mode[!], and of course endlessly configurable plain ol' arena versus, including highly-configurable bots—the closest I've seen something come to this is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, of all games, but it still wasn't that close. Most elements/modes exist somewhere, but rarely in one package. The way difficulty levels didn't just make the enemies bullet sponges and better shots [though it did also do that] but also changed objectives and sometimes starting location, was also excellent and isn't as common as I wish it were)
- Return Fire (vehicle-based CTF multiplayer, with elaborate pre-built defensive base structures for both sides—this game's not quite all there, but make it more than 2 player and add a little base-building and it'd be amazing)
- Battletanx (Actually a little similar to Return Fire, now that I think about it, but with a lot more of a traditional multiplayer-shooter feel, different camera perspective, and the vehicles are all kinds of tanks. AFAIK nothing like this or Return Fire has been released since the N64/Playstation era)
- Dominus (The single genre it's closest to is probably tower defense, but it's got a whole lot more going on than most of those)
Also, edutainment disappoints me these days. Drill-type games (as in, drilling math problems) seem to have gotten much better, but sheer knowledge games (Explorers of the New World, Microsoft's Dinosaurs) seem to have all but disappeared, aside from adult-targeted trivia games, which don't have a learning focus and aren't very good at teaching you things. The Trail series (yeah, it's still around, by why aren't there similarly-clever and well-made games for 1,000 other historical situations, too?). I actually think this category would get a lot better, fast, if we had decent, accessible multi-media authoring tools for the web. The closest thing we had was Flash, and it's gone.
My orthodontist had it running on an N64 in the lobby. Something about the N64/PS1 era delighted in weird and insane weapons. An updated version (with a better plot) would be amazing.
I’d want artillery for some levels as well. Basically a Halo game that only had land vehicles.
Uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure you couldn't get away with "a plague killed most of the women so the few remaining ones are all breeding-queens of warrior bands and you have to try to capture them" in the 2020s, even as kind of a joke. But the plot also didn't really matter, so it could be anything. You really want the other guys' donuts. Or something. Doesn't matter, it was really just arena tank CTF with limited base-defense-building.
The problem is, once you've created that kind of market, everything needs to be handled server-side to prevent clients from cheating and using hacked save files to give themselves tons of resources and making the market worthless.
The cloud compute costs for running thousands of factories could get expensive. I suppose factories of offline players could be abstracted away. ie, "You produced X widgets in ten minutes, then went offline for an hour, so when you come back, you will have 6*X widgets".
You might be interested in O-Game, which was kind of like what you're describing on the factory front, but doesn't have any economy that I recall.
It's not about cheating the trades or the market, it's about a client saying "btw I have a massive factory that's producing 10 million widgets per hour" on release day.
Factory simulation needs to happen server-side. You can't trust the client to have followed the rules on resource mining and factory building.
There are also a lot of factory games in Roblox, and an interesting detail is that they are generally multiplayer and you are indeed interacting and competing with the other factories much like you describe. Hard to find the good ones in the sea of games though.
'Witch Hunter' the MMO based on the world of 'Witch Hunter Robin'. Basically there are two classes. One are hunters. They work as teams, coordinate and try to capture/kill witches. This groups levels up via witch captures/kills and has to work together as they are often very out classed by individual witches. This group has a map with detected witch activity that they can use to go find witches, as well as some team building functionality to build raids real time. Think "Rainbow 6" for game play. Ideally there is the possibility of AI hunters as well. Level of response is allocated based on level of detection.
The witches are individuals, they exist in a procedural generated world. They need to practice their witchcraft without being seen and if they do get seen they need to flee the area and re-establish. This becomes more of a survival aspect like GTA's wanted framework. If a witch gets attacked by a hunter and survives they get XP, and ideally level up based on that. Witches can also find other witches and attack them or for some skills, work with them to level up as well. Witches can be given classes (fire, water, telekinesis, etc) and once the witch dies it is dead and a new witch must be created and placed in the world somewhere.
Two different games kind of, but paired together to make it fun for both sides. =)
The last spin-off, Stargate Universe, had a nice set up: you're in an old battered ship that you can't control, without even the most basic resources. So you should use the gate and the shuttles to bring materials, make repairs, solve riddles to gain access to ship steering, fight nasty aliens, etc.
Also the series had an open end a decade ago, so there's room for extension.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1523650/Stargate_Timekeep...
Of the AR games I know Ingress was the closest but I think the interactions were too adversarial which made the experience decline.
The creators of AR games got a lesson from it. Unfortunately it's rather "limit interaction" not "fix the interaction". Both Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite seem to have taken the path of players playing next to each other rather than with each other (I stole this sentiment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31503528).
So what I'd like is an AR game where you interact with other players in a meaningful way.
Each level sets the objectives for the one below, so the RTS players pick a pool of FPS players and set their objectives (go here, attack these other players or this objective). The CiV players actions determine the maps & matchups of the FPS/RTS players. They could see the stats of teams of other players to decide where to send them (this team with a low K/D ratio should retreat from this enemy team, this team does well on that map, etc).
Balance and matchmaking would be a real technical/game design challenge.
This would be a terrific non-violent flight combat game; you could imagine with modern graphics and even VR it could be very satisfying.
Further, the consultant lost his license for a couple of years when he evaded an opponent by illegally flying under a highway overpass and a passer-by reported his plane's ID to the FAA; that could be a mechanic itself, extra risky maneuvers that had a chance of some big negative effect.
Commands are also stylised; I'm not a military person, and I don't know how to compose field orders, so there would need to be some kind of UI that allows you to construct orders visually. But in the end, the order that you send consists of text. You can't order-around squads; you can only issue orders to subordinate commanders.
You also receive orders from above. You start with a mission briefing, with objectives. But your orders can be updated mid-mission.
So this would be essentially not a video game; there's no motion video. It's a text game, with a graphical map. For added entertainment, you could have a retrospective video playback; but you wouldn't have realtime video from the frontline that you could act on.
I once had a game a bit like this; it was for military use, and I didn't really understand the format of the orders. Also, commands were issued by dragging on the map, rather than by text.
Something like: "You will advance to grid square X. You are to avoid engagement. You will report enemy positions."
I'm thinking of modern warfare, with radios/telegraphs, air power and integrated air defence, armour, and intelligence staff. But you could maybe take it back as far as the Napoleonic wars, with dispatch riders instead of telegraphs.
And I think the Ultimate General series of games also does some of this, but that's second hand.
I've moved almost all of my game playing over to Apple Arcade these days because the games don't track you, don't have ads, don't have scummy gameplay tactics (like paying for loot boxes, etc.), and just generally don't annoy the crap out of me.
My point being that I want something new and different and interesting, and that isn't a crapfest of malware, tracking, and financial extraction.
Beyond that, I really really miss the exact niche Atmosphir used to fill, UGC platformer with enough tools to make variations on the base mechanic, but not a full-blown game-making toolkit. I want making levels to be intrinsically captivating, to create simple new gameplay ideas, but not get lost in the myriad construction details of such things. At the time there were some neat alternatives, like GameGlobe or Project Spark, but nowadays' titles are either too mechanically restrictive (Mario Maker) or too much of a tool (Dreams).
I actually help maintain (together with a bunch of excellent people) an archival/revival server of Atmosphir, but the minuscule community makes it hard to make multiplayer levels, and getting feeback on your creations.
The story’s end was such a… mix of emotions is all I’ll say.
I went in relatively blind and the major mechanics of the game were really fun after I figured out what was going on.
Is the Enhanced Edition available on Steam any good, or should I go for the original release?
Had a similar feeling about its ending, but I think it worked out fine.
(and if you're reading this as someone who hasn't played it, stop reading, there's no way to phrase this without some amount of spoilers) did you go back to the base game's ending after doing the DLC ending? "There's more to explore here", as the game would put it ::)
— third-person (like Kotor, The Witcher, etc.)
— open-world (like Skyrim, The Witcher, etc.)
— using unit targeting (not shooter) mechanics for spells (like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: OS II, etc.)
— online co-op
I think the combination of Skyrim, The Witcher, and Pillars of Eternity would be perfect. Most games I've found hit 3 of the above criteria, but not all. I've always loved the idea of Skyrim's open world and lore, but prefer the 'dice roll' hit mechanic (as opposed to 'were you aiming at them when you acted?').
Using the OpemMW engine, I guess they have multiplayer and VR support now. No idea how well it will work out, but it might be fun to try.
Real empathy is hard and the real world could stand to see more of it.
It can be deep, complex, simple, fun, easy to play hard to master, whichever kind of cooperation -> leading to more synergy, dare I say symbiosis between the players!
Ok, random idea that just popped in my brain: You could have a cooperative game where the goal is to handle nutrients, etc. in order to cooperatively build a baby inside's a female womb. Basically, it would be about achieving "life" by cooperating: repelling microbes, driving whatever fluids/vitamins/hormones are needed to the right places, etc. etc.
This is why pregnancy is so perilous. It's a war, presumably because human development requires a lot of resources, and the father can always find a new woman to impregnate, so it's genes best served by trying to steal said resources, as long as most women most of the time are capable defending themselves until the baby is born, preferably longer things chug along.
And oddly enough, Detroit: Become Human
I'd like it to have a focus on atmosphere, isolation, collecting data, and lore that's all about technology and the sciences (ie biology, even fake biology is ok, like in MP1). Maybe the main character is some guy with a space suit, a blaster, and a scanning tool.
Ideally I don't want a leveling or survival-crafting aspect to it. Just a Metroidvania FPS - walk around, scan stuff to get 100% completion in your logbook, find all the upgrades and ammo expansions... and of course, blast any local flora and fauna that attacks you.
Some of the following games have a few of those elements: - Subnautica (particularly the scannable things, isolation theme, and a lot of the technology the player builds) - Dead Space (particularly the isolation element, but I also loved the use of technology/screens in that game against the backdrop of horror atmosphere and monsters) - Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Void Bastards
I adore the first few hours of the original Metroid Prime where you wander an alien planet discovering new things for the first time: new plants, new animals, strange Chozo artifacts. Some of them want to kill you; most are just going about their business. It's magical.
Then the Space Pirates show up and the entire tone changes and the magic is gone.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&...
2. Factorio with RNG, like having wear and tear for machines, random failures, machines producing faulty parts.
3. Crusader Kings 2, without the military micro management.
One way I have potentially solved this issue is by giving players the ability to design their own buildings in game. The player will see only the interior of the building, so I dont have to worry about making buildings look good (that's up to the player).
I dont have a video featuring this yet, but if you want to see what I've got so far, I've got a path finding tech demo here:
Paradox games often do have player just waiting for a thing to happen, like forging a fake claim to a territory to get a causus belli. Yes it is a boring part of the game, and makes it feel like a "waiting game", just waiting for a progress bar to fill.
I played a lot of Cities in Motion 2, and really loved it. You can't just use trains (as they are expensive), you need to build a complete transportation network with feeder routes and use different modes of transport. The only issues were it is a little buggy, the UI was a little complex, and performance really tanked once your city got to a certain size (because Unity).
Cities Skylines was meant to be CiM 3 mixed with SimCity, but they really nerfed the transport mechanics there IMO. As a overall city simulator it's great, but as a transport simulator not so much.
Transport Fever just feels like a TTD clone with prettier graphics and worse game mechanics.
I don't care if I get HN downvoted for this, but I love the fact that you're out there in the world and appreciating the subtle beauty of transpirt.
Rock on.
Give me: - Proven game engine... I'm looking at you UE5 - Player made 3d models (complex in game system...? Blender already exists) - Exciting, educational and realistic physics (e.g. orbital mechanics) - Exciting multiplayer without physics simulation glitches ("CLANG") - More varied biomes, terrain and open worlds that don't fall apart if you explore to much... looking at you Minecraft - Various shopfronts, stores and integrations that are accessible for all
That's not to rip on the games which pioneered the genre (Teraria, Minecraft and Space engineers stand out to me), but I'm ready for the next evolution.
Personally, I like to work teaser math problems and algorithms, like the Traveling Salesman Problem, set sorting problems, or whatever. It's so much more fun to know you might by happenstance, fumbeling arounds in math space, find something actually beneficial to the world. You'll never contribute to society play a "bounded game" like candy crush or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that I wish there were such a thing as an "unbounded game" that truly allowes you to discover. I think protein folding crowd sourcing comes close, but how fun is that, really? (I'm literally asking, I don't know, I've never partaken)
How do you make a game that also contributes to collective knowledge?
To me, that's the point of a game. To relax my brain with something a little silly and 'easy'.
https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Babylon_5:_Into_the_Fire_(G...
I really really want to play that, two player, on my phone over network where my finger controls the liquid.
Game Maker's Toolkit has a really good video on why it's difficult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwV_mA2cv_0
Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story are the best I've played so far, each excelling at different things.
There are two hard parts to this: (1) how do you make the game balanced even as the number of players fluctuates by orders of magnitude, (2) how do you make the game fun even as the amount of time each player spends differs by orders of magnitude. You will probably want key plot twists to be announced in advance so that as few people miss them as possible ("we predict the enemy hoard will arrive at our base on Friday around 8:15 PM").
And on top of that, in the one I'm following at the moment, the world is being eaten by a void and the rumor is that when everything is gone that's gonna be the end forever
Tons of user content Scripting engine Modern mechanics Modern systems
It would need to be a platform first.
In the existing game there's an escalation of your bullet spongy-ness to enemy level complexity, this naturally happens as you progress through the map. I would remove the bullet resistance and player levels and go with an almost totally real health experience and I'd try and blend more Hitman style recon elements into the game.
Like being able to drive around, or walk around plain close with no weapons to recon places, and have to talk with locals about the enemy in detail. I'd also preserve progress, if you free an area the enemy should become less of a presence and the freedom fighters should take charge.
Oh I would also limit gear by weight. In hitman, it's pretty amazing just how many apples and coconuts you can hi in your jacket without it being a problem. I would limit space and gear on the person. Like you could cache it but you have to come back to the cache to get it.
I'm not sure the game im describing would be a AAA killer so it may just have to live on in my dreams.
It's probably important to note that both your character and your enemies are stuffed toys, but I enjoyed putting off that disclosure to the end of this comment.
2. Elite: Dangerous with 90% less grind.
3. A million more variations of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing concept.
4. CRPGs that could capture lightning in the bottle in the same way that the Ultima series did in the 90s.
5. A civilization simulation with such detail that you could base serious policy decisions on how things work out with different political settings.
[0] https://naga.icesus.org/icesus/ being my personal favourite
Heroes of the Storm is my favorite game, but development has stagnated. There's still a lot of potential for exploring new and innovating ideas within the genre, but things have stagnated thanks to the dominance of League of Legends and DotA2.
There is a theory in Aikido that difficulty peaks at 3 simultaneous attackers because after that, they will get in each other's way. [1]
So the main objective of the game is to place yourself in the best position and hold/throw enemies in advantageous directions. Actual attacks may be executed automatically for you so you can focus on the strategy.
[1]: https://tampaaikido.com/articles/saotome-sensei-and-the-scie...
- Terraria-like game mechanics, without the cutesyness, and set in a Warhammer 40k, Path of Exile, or cyberpunk universe.
- A game like Sethian, but where there's much more actual learning of an "alien" language instead of the dumbed-down version of learning Sethian has.
- Zachtronics-like games that are closer to actual programming instead of being just puzzle games with a programming veneer.
- A much more performant version of Screeps.
- Single-player PvE MUDs with rich worlds where you can actually interact with everything you read in room descriptions and where the rooms aren't mostly the same.
- More 2D games.
- More games targeted at intelligent people rather than the lowest common denominator.
I think it would be very difficult to get the level of control right, you perhaps want a hand lathe view like World of Guns (very detailed, can manipulate all components and tear down the whole tool) but if you're planing a plank you would want to almost wave the tool at the surface and have it work.
There is something about the simplicity of tui that makes you focused on the actual content.
oh ya, and it needs to run on raspberry pi and not crazy machine like a mac.
haven't found anything close to this.
It won't run in your terminal but you can play from a raspberry pi.
Mount&Blade Warband has some kind of trader system but very basic and you are not a merchant and the whole experience is not fulfilling.
We already have very sophisticated dynamical models for how airplanes fly (which are deftly integrated into flight simulators) but no way of designing custom airframes.
I'm thinking that you design an aircraft: choose wing cross section shape, taper, sweep, position, control surfaces, etc. You could choose materials (ok maybe no aeroelastic stuff, just weight and failure from stress).
Then you can fly it around for fun in a realistic simulator, combat with other players, or some other mission (range? transportation aircraft? etc.)
Closest I've seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafortress - modified B-52; very early flight-sim, so pretty weak, and no nukes. Best on Amiga, but easy to play today with Dos-box on a PC. Multiple crew stations, but single player only. I would die for a re-make with multi-player co-op.
Any flight sim fans seen anything remotely similar?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68186/toe-toe-nuklr-comb...
Basically an instance based game where you gather a team of dungeon delvers to explore a dungeon and get good loot. You would have to pick your loadout (equipment and skills) according to what you think would be needed to dungeoneer successfully for the given challenges of a dungeon. On death you would lose all the equipment you brought, but you wouldn't lose your level or skills.
Dungeons would have different challenges. So one might be a close quarters crypt like some Mayan or Egyptian pyramid. One might be a larger ancient city like Atlantis. Some a mix of both. The NPC enemies, traps, and puzzles could be random each time based on a pool of the types for those dungeons.
There would be other groups of competing adventurers trying to get through the dungeon, but I think the dungeons should be scaled so that running into them is less likely than say the game "Escape from Tarkov". Also I think the game should do a dice roll while match making to determine whether a given match has no opposing teams or many opposing teams. This will keep you on your feet PvP wise but allow the game to focus mostly PvE. PvP here mostly serves the purpose of providing a challenge to players that can't be "solved" since the ingenuity and unpredictability of players is greater than that of typical AI.
(This thread makes me realise just how many games already exist and that I've never heard of.)
I imagine it as a race of sorts, potentially with the enemies being a multiplayer team and maybe rocket league esque physics/mechanics crossed with Mario kart. But, surrounding the track is an increasing level of towers that are bombarding the track. You can dodge and whatnot to survive, multitude of obstacles, ramps, power ups, etc. perhaps even a way to shoot back at the towers.
A snowball fight game. A multiplayer game that plays like japanese dodgeball games, like dodge danpei. However, you wouldn't use the super throws willy-nilly, because if other players catch your super throw, N number of times, they'll end up learning it, and can use it on you. You can also build snow walls, forts, etc. during the course of the match.
A time-traveling superhero. A simulated city, where a bunch of crime will take place, and it's up to you to try to save as many people as you can. You can rewind time and redo things, but the things that you do will have other side effects and outcomes that affect your ability to save someone else. In the end, it's clear that no matter how powerful you get, you won't be able to save everyone and some citizen is going to be mad at you. Pick from other time power heroes, that can replay time with another body, or another one that can slow down time.
I'm wondering if there are similar short strategy games that you like? In particular, is there one that models supply lines well?
has been around since March 2000, and currently free to play
1) Total War series — it's not FPS per se but there is the idea of managing the macro situation (resources, where armies are, developing cities, etc.) and then when you actually attack another army or lay seige, you have more of a tactical view where you direct the action.
2) The original Rainbow Six (and maybe some of its immediate sequels). You would plan out exactly what you want every one of your special ops guys to do (e.g., when I give the signal throw a flashbang into this room) and then you get to play as one of them. Not sure if anyone has replicated this yet!
The map design is amazing, game runs and looks great. Highly reccomend
Honestly, NS and NS2 the commander was a fun position. You play to upgrade your units, grab resource nodes, and expand influence, while trying to direct non-compliant troops. (Really throws in a wrench to your RTS when you can't get your soldiers to do something you need). Another aspect is in the smaller team dynamic of NS, one or two good troopers can have an outsized effect on enabling the commanders gameplay.
Empire mod gets around this by having larger teams (15+ vs 15+) with vehicles, upgrades, weapon customization, tech trees, so it really plays like a war where you need to counter what the enemy brings to the field in terms of tech.
Empires mod, quite detailed FPS RTS. Even has vehicles, tanks, APC, resource nodes.
It's been awhile since I played, but there was still some development on it a few years ago.
Downside is its a bit older. (2008 release)
The way it's made requires a lot of dedication -> gathering everyone, organisation to communicate can be tricky particularly if you want realistic kind of comms: teamspeak is still required (I don't think there's a realistic mod for Arma 3 compatible with Discord).
Nevertheless, Arma 3 has everything you need:
Big maps (open world)
An actual map (I am talking about the paper/GPS thing) -> with actual elevation information on it, etc.
Complex strategies and tactics possibilities
Communications
Vehicles: helicopters, tanks, cars, trucks, planes, boats, etc. etc.
A very WIDE set of weapons of all kinds: turrets, firearms, launchers, mortars, etc. etc.
All this adds up to the need of coordination, planning, preparing strategies, primary objectives, secondary objectives, backup plans, backup plans for your backup plans, etc.
Whoever gets eaten last wins the round and gets to be the shark next round.
A fictional open world game based on interacting with various cities and towns, where you perhaps build out your own city based on actions, could be really fun. Might chart a little too close to Sony’s Horizon series but I think you could build in enough drama without the dinosaur robots to make it compelling.
One of the best takes on this FFA style that I've played recently (released 2015 though) is subterfuge - http://subterfuge-game.com. It's a mobile game that pits up to 10 players in an FFA game. It's more or less a "risk" style game. Expansion is rewarded with better army production rates and higher army capacity, at the cost of larger borders to defend. Orders can be issued in real time, and the game has built-in player group chats. However, the game is set up so that after attacks are launched they frequently take 8-10 hours to reach their destination, meaning a game typically lasts 1.5-2 weeks, which has some very interesting side effects on the meta side of the gameplay, as there's plenty of time for scheming with other factions in between orders.
My ideal game is a game that lasts 1-2 hours, features 6-10 players, and incentivizes each to striving for an individual win against the other 9. The actual game mechanics need to provide some kind of resources that can be traded, some kind of cost/benefit to expanding your in-game power, and a large benefit to teaming up with other players to fight a third 2v1. There also needs to be some relatively-costly way to knock out other players, which frequently incentivizes mad-dash finales, suicide runs and all kinds of other player-driven shenanigans.
I've often wanted to play Populous again, in the decades since I had an Amiga, and was anxiously awaiting Godus. But on first play it pretty much embodied everything I hate about gaming these days.
The kicker is that there are higher gods that similarly control your environment, whatever that might be. You're never aware of their presence, but you do end up impacted by various things outside your control, as you keep trying to achieve your goals. As you succeed, you just might ascend to the next level. Each level is won or lost through some interplay of your own decisions and those beyond your grasp. At some point, the whole thing wraps around and you find out that the first civilization you controlled was in fact the one most ascended.
There are party based RPG's like Divinity or Dragon Age, but I'm less interested in character dynamics and story. I just want Diablo where you control a large party.
Currently the only options are replaying Dungeon Siege 1 + 2 (which I do) and Guild Wars 1 with a full party of heroes (which I also still play).
I still play Diablo with 8 characters occasionally. I wish there was a game like this.
2) Dwarf Fortress, but with at least Double-A 3D production.
3) A proper Groundhog Day sim. There have been a dozen piss-poor cracks at this.
For time travel, exploiting quick save/load is a sort of backwards time travel.
http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/devours/ Working online interpreter link: https://iplayif.com/?story=http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowe...
I like your thinking, though damn that would be one hell of a project.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
Basically one player is playing starcraft against 99 players trying to reach the middle of an island. The 99 players are playing first person survival battle royale - their goal is to beat the other players to the middle of the island where there's a throne to ascend and win the game.
The player playing as God gets to bring in environmental spells into the game and can direct a roving band of animals. The God player's goal is to prevent the 99 players from reaching the middle but can only do so in very specific ways that basically come down to herding players together and hoping they fight or dropping supply drops somewhere on the map where players are encouraged to fight over the drop.
There would be a limited amount of servers that players can fight over to become the next "God" of the island. Expanded features would allow players to design their island, yadda yadda.
I've basically been designing it slowly for if I can ever pitch it.
I don't like NS2 but I played NS1 alot and it's the first? or atleast best FPS RTS to date! Now only these guys play it: https://www.ensl.org
The problem is seeding something like that with players.
But I'm leaning into what you describe: PUBG (roguelike/punishing/PvP everywhere) + BotW (looks) + Minecraft (proc. gen. voxel and moddable) + Roblox (resellable) is the aim for my engine.
It's actually mildly inspired by Savage 2 from S2Games which I think was just ahead of their time.
I have some ideas on how to seed it with players to avoid the Spellbreak fiasco but that would be part of how I design it and I don't want to write all my ideas out in the wild :)
For reference, 'Limbo' is the kind of game that fits the length of game I'm describing.
Procedurally generated[1] large-scale environment[2] to explore with the prime goal of adventuring downwards, with layers of organic pristine biomes[3], full of unexplainable relics and asymmetrically strong entities that live naturally within[4].
Risk of Rain 2 is the closest thing I know to this, the biggest difference being the gameplay (it's more of a fun shooter game, rather than an exploration/adventure game) and the fictional universe.
[1]: Primarily the tactical gameplay elements (terrain, elevation, enemies, spots of interest, etc.) much like roguelike games, over the visual aspects (colors, animals, trees, etc.) like No Man's Sky or biomes in Minecraft
[2]: Think of FromSoftware games: Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring — it invokes a sense of massive explorable environment, with limited movement capabilities
[3]: Think about the amazement and awe invoked when exploring an undiscovered, unique biomes in e.g.: Subnautica (Lava Lakes) or Etrian Odyssey (practically all the stratum)
[4]: Think of Monster Hunter monsters
I want the format of Return of the Obra Dinn applied to a loads different scenarios. It is such a fantastic way to solve crimes and/or peoples fates.
When your empire is powerful enough, you automatically become the Galactic Emperor without having to grind the final conquest. But now the game turns into a bureaucracy simulator where you try to keep your empire intact against tides of decay and disappointment.
Something like Daggerfall (huge, procedurally generated world for an RPG) combined with a much more dynamic AI that generates political events, quests, etc.
The lesson RPGs took from Daggerfall was to hand-design dungeons. I think that was understandable, but maybe the wrong lesson.
Think a bit like Skyrim with lots of summoning.
What do I mean by "dark themed"? Permadeath for your pokemon and gory, realistic outcomes from the attacks. But to go with that, make it so that you have to personally train and bond with your pokemon in some way, so that each is a significant time investment and it hurts if they die. Perhaps learning a move involves some sort of minigame where you have to participate, and practice raises accuracy/damage.
Combine that with a survival element. If you go into the wild you need to gather food, find shelter to sleep, perhaps kill stuff for food if needed.
Mechanically though I'd like to add more flexibility. Do away with the 4 move limit and allow a creature that logically has some ability always have it. Eg, anything that's big enough and has wings can be used for transport, but perhaps you need some sort of practice minigame for it to let you ride.
Other games I wish more existed are puzzle games like Myst and Obduction. I want a puzzle game that makes me think outside the box and encourages discovery. I understand though why those games take so long to make and many puzzle games go for easier "puzzle" minigames because that appeals to a larger audience and is a lot easier to program.
2D MMO-RTS where you can design your ship, have it simulated for structural properties (it will affect stats) and then fabricate those ships and use many of them to mine/explore/fight/trade. Space is physically size-accurate, but you have jumps (some ships are capable of jumps themselves or even take some small ships along, but there is possibility of large jumpgates that can take you in one jump to other solar systems). There would be hundreds of available systems with lots of bodies to mine, but you can do anything in interstellar space. One player can control many ships a little like in starcraft, battles of thousands of ships should be possible, also big station structures.
I would pledge.
People love spaceships. Look at Star Citizen’s fundraising success.
Also commenting so I can come back and see if this goes anywhere!
In any case good luck on your project because the idea you have is basically the same as mine and has been a dream game of mine for many years.
1. The scale of space: I was comitted to custom engine for this (first techdemo based on love2d). When centimeter resolution is enough, you can go with int64, it's good for one solar system and you can represent deep space as grid of empty solar systems (hierarchical coordinate system). At such scales, even standard doubles have problems and bigger doubles or are too slow.
2. Scale of player's time: hyperspace jumps for "small" distances of up to half a solar year (so many jumps required between solar systems) and big jump gates (so you have to pool resources with other players) for fast jumps between systems (allows for factions to have their own jump gates, war can destroy gates, you need to pool resources to make gates and can extract rent for jumping trading ships). Having to wait single minutes to dock or do any sensible navigation is a slightly shady but efficient way to hook up player for more gameplay time.
3. Yeah, choosing a good language and engine is hard, I can't help you with this, you just have to commit some time and try them all. Fortunately for me, I'm good at learning programming languages and can write in anything (client engine in c/c++/lua, server in c/erlang, some tools in python).
Something like having a hideout where you can accept contracts with little info on the target. Then you would gather information, like when is your target arriving at the airport, which hotel is it staying at, etc, so you could choose where, when and how to hit. It would be more tactical, similar to the old Rainbow Six games, where planning was 95% of the game and execution of the plan was more or less a formality if the plan was good.
Then a system like in Hitman: Blood Money where getting caught on camera or having witnesses would raise the awareness in security (they know your face -> you can't get close and have to plan accordingly).
Each contract would get you money for equipment, bribes, cars, better or more hideouts. It would be very complex, but not impossible.
I thought it was funny to think that's what the dating apps are, but then it clicked that this is essentially what getting news from internet forums is like.
Initial storyline is you have been tapped to join an informal multidisciplinary team to find, detect, and isolate an experimental bot that has escaped from a FAANG by leveraging a fuzzing and vulnerability research tool that got left in an open code repo. Based on its last known training set, it was designed to harvest compute from compromised machines, optimizing for persistence and longevity, and relies mainly javascript in browsers for the compute, so it has evolved the ability to participate in forums and write provocative content to get engagement that it turns into .js cycles. The environmental externality the bot is causing is mass psychological harm, and it has learned to adapt language to prey on vulnerable people as a way to scale itself and use their minds to produce the conflict it relies on for engagement and compute. The informal group is being assembled so as to maintain official deniability at the political level, and it's possible you've been recruited because of your pattern recognition abilities, and because nobody would believe you if you disclosed it.
Its weakness is that it does not have an internal or intrinsic sense of humor, and so it has to a/b test its memetic material on sample people before deploying it, so it lacks entropy. Isolating it means detecting it without providing it with the means to disguise itself again, and the player objective is to innoculate people with defensive material so that they can recognize the bot's absurdity and inferior memetic strains.
Would you like to play this game?
The premise sounds pretty cool. I'd be more interested in coding the monster than killing it, tbh.
I might go to a town, fail to take a side in the battle that town is locked in, and when I come back the town is laid waste. The quests that would be available to me in town are no longer there, but I might have errands where I end up searching the woods for refugees instead.
Something like that'd have a lot of replay value, because what you do changes the game you're playing over time.
I just don't think a simulation on that scale can possibly work. Obviously, such a massive scale would have to be split over multiple servers, but I'd want the world to be seamless, as in, you can just pan over and see other people's cities. The player shouldn't be able to tell that the area they're looking at is being run on another server.
I just can't imagine how a system would operate. How do you perform path finding when the paths are likely to cross over areas run by a dozen other servers? How does it scan to millions of vehicles needing to find their path?
Then when the player zooms in again, individual roads can still be adjusted, which simply changes the formula describing the city's traffic flow.
I suppose it could be possible for a server to track something like "The last 10 trucks to enter my area at location A and leave my area at location B took an average of C minutes, so just assume any path finding through me will take C minutes and don't track the individual trucks"
But then what happens when some zooms into that server's area while a truck is partway through its course? How do I simulate a traffic jam occurring after a path has been planned if I'm abstracting the individual vehicles away?
Teleport to historic and ancient cities and just walk around immersing yourself in architecture, languages, commerce and food. Imagine walking around in ancient Mayan, Egyptian cities hearing speech that is close enough to what people spoke at that time, witnessing day to day life thousands of years ago.
What do we have?
A few FPSs that end up all being very similar with slightly different skins.
OG xbox
crimson skies
Fuzion Frenzy
Mechassult
ps3
Rayman origins & legends
Ratchet & Clank All4One.
Little Big Planet.
Street Fighter IV (and the multitude of similar games)
Lego games
Portal 2
WipEoutHD
Stardust.
Modnation racers
Motor Storm.
Sports champions.
ps4
Overcooked.
RocketLeague (constantly gimped by auto update removing couch multiplayer!)The angle I had to it though, was the world was at peace for a thousand years. So no nation needed any armies or military, but are now suddenly thrust into a conflict. So the nations need to mature rapidly from basically a policy force, to a fully fledged military, integrating new warfare advances as they occur. With new advances and countermeasures coming out from each side as the game progresses throwing the state of affairs off balance. And then get's reset every couple of months or something.
There is a meme that even when people get together IRL, they end up staring at their own phones.
So I've been wondering if a game can be designed to motivate people to gather together, then put down their devices, or at least look at the devices together. (Like forming a larger screen across multiple devices.) I think the game would be location-aware and cooperative.
Ideally the game would be a casual game so people could have conversations while playing the game. Either the game mechanics are simple so it doesn't require full concentration/attention, and/or only intermittent playing is allowed/required. (Like the game mechanics require waiting for something to happen.)
Also with crispier graphics, but avoiding the goofines of Oblivion.
I remember my first time seeing the Ordinators. You hardly see such detail and badass design in RPG games now.
So, in essence, I want Morrowind remastered.
While I love games like Cities Skylines, Cities in Motion, and Banished, they don't go for real-world scale on a number of aspects.
Things that are just normal and common in the real world - like footbridges, underpasses, etc are either not possible or super janky/modded in and manually placed.
When day-night cycles exist, people and vehicles usually don't move at the right speed - so someone setting off to their job 20KM away in a car/bus/tram/train might take all day to get there.
In Banished a character can't walk across a reasonable sized village without starving or freezing to death. Nobody invented the packed lunch.
I don't remember the author, but it correctly predicted aspects of online culture and relationships that were not widely known or understood in 1982 or 1983.
Remake of Cyberpunk 2077
Each level could have different regions, terrains, and specific disasters you need to optimize your forecasting system for (e.g. hurricanes, fires, blizzards, etc.)
If the roads had enough intersections, a random race could be defined on the existing map instead of dynamically creating a new road for each race, as in DIRT4.
Basically, this would be a Criterion-style (Burnout Paradise, NFS Hot Pursuit 2010, Most Wanted 2012) racing game with Codies physics and visual style. I'd be a fan of that.
Massive Chalice was a great example, where the pets metagame was about managing a dynasty of fighters, and at the lowest level it was a tactical fighter. The genetics system was relatively simple, and I want to see what it's like when it's developed further.
- I'd like to see some some fully offline, single-player CCG/Deckbuilding RPGs in the style of the old Pokemon CCG Gameboy games. Balancing single-player card games is a lot easier than balancing multiplayer deck-builders, and I'd be fine with pixel-based top-down graphics (in fact I might even prefer them). RPG formats work well with CCGs; I want to run around and find rare cards in areas where my AI opponents have themed decks and gimmicks, and I want to be able to build a card collection and make little decks without worrying about microtransactions and online ladders. A nice little offline RPG with cards.
- I'd like to see more games (in general) of any genre experiment and iterate more with Breath of the Wild's weapon durability system. BotW pretty much single-handedly changed my mind on the potential of durability systems, and I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done by designers who sit and really work through what made BotW's system work so much better than durability in a lot of traditional survival games. I think a lot of people glossed over (or criticized) what I think is possibly the most innovative part of BotW, so I'd love to see more games jump into that space and try to translate out those mechanics again in a way that players might understand or respond to better.
- I'd like to see some vaguely I-Spy or Where's Waldo games that are designed to be on some level passive backgrounds -- essentially games that are designed to be mostly pretty dioramas with a lot of stuff happening in them, where player interaction is more about just clicking things or seeing how they react to each other. I want a game that takes low resources that I can leave running on a Raspberry Pi or other low-power computer, hooked up to a monitor in my living room, where I can just occasionally walk past and spend maybe 3-minutes interacting with it. I want a game that is mostly a display piece, that captures the feeling of having a nice diaorma or animated scene, but where I can occasionally whenever I'm feeling bored or spacing out click on a few things and maybe hunt for some objects, possibly over the course of a week or two working through a list of hidden objects.
In battle, you can choose your Pokemon based on the opponent and your hand is a mix of Player and Pokemon cards.
You gain more Pokemon, or cards for Pokemon, by exploring the wilds.
You gain Player cards and gold by battling other trainers.
I guess for a proper modern Rougelite you should have "relics", gained by battling Gym leaders, rare Pokemon, or completing quests by NPCs.
Or a quest/RPG in a distant future, something in the spirit of Arthur C.Clarke’s The City and the Stars.
You get the idea.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had an interesting co-op mode where you and a friend could be deployed into a customized campaign level, accomplish the objective, and exfiltrate. I'd love a game to really own this: good characters, fun gameplay, custom levels, mutators, etc.
A massively multiplayer RTS that is essentially a combination of Factorio [1], Rust [2] (the game), Planetary Annihilation [3], and Z [4].
Thematically what I've wanted is the persistent nature of Rust, with the logistic focus of Factorio, the scale of Planetary Annihilation, and a dash of the absurdity of Z (which I haven't played in a very long time so I might be off a bit there). Controlling units, managing supply lines, planning complex offensives, setting up a defensive posture for when you're offline, creating one or more bases to supply yourself, researching technology to increase capabilities, and a very open system for cooperation (or not) are aspects of games that I have yet to see combined. I am for sure leaving out quite a bit here, but if I had all the time and money in the world I'd throw this all together as a weird experiment and see what happened.
[1] https://www.factorio.com/ [2] https://rust.facepunch.com/ [3] https://planetaryannihilation.com/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(video_game)
1) Scaling is super-linear, so players who got ahead only get more ahead. Unless you add some (frustrating) gimmick to give a chance for others to catch up, a small number of players or factions will control the universe
2) Fighting offline players isn't fun for either party involved. There are some workarounds for this, like EVE Online's timer system (bases can only be attacked at a specific time), but they are far from perfect
One player with enough explosives and appropriate braking power could land himself in an automated factory and rig it to blow in just a few days (depending on the scale of the factory).
Maybe add a time-based ban mechanic to discourage this behaviour. "It takes X days/weeks to re-assemble your constituent atoms. Money will speed this process up."
So my fantasy was to create a bit of a twist: A PvE + PvP RTS+RPG game, where you can equip a limited set of technologies, and where you can unlock many technologies like an RPG. You’ll basically have a “commander level” or something which you can grow slowly, unlocking new technologies and unlocking new unit slots.
Imagine for example a new player will have 1 tank slot, and 1 factory slot, with 0 ability slots. He’ll start a game (against AI or another similarly leveled player) and when he wins, he’ll level up (eventually unlocking more slots) and “find” some “loot” (new technologies)
So every match requires you to build from scratch, you build some stuff for 5-20 minutes until you win (or lose) (maybe using blueprints etc to speed it up / make it easier) and at the end you’ll unlock stuff you can use in your next match.
Maybe you can combine this whole gameplay look with a “home base”, which you can visit and have factories running, and which you can expand whenever you wish (limited space). To get more space, you’ll have to clear the area by force. (AI bases) Attacking these bases will trigger very aggressive AI which you’ll have to defend against (so it’s basically a tower / wave defense). Maybe your home base can run 24/7 (but do require you to login every day, or it will be paused) and unlock some kind of stuff which you can then use to unlock more technologies.
The technologies can be just a limited set of units with slightly randomized stats and visuals, and some optional changes you can equip as abilities.
You can play missions COOP with friends, or play against each other. Add some cool events, event-exclusive technologies (just the same units but with different skin and slightly different stats).
The idea here is to make RTS games more accessible to people that are less into “APM” and the best micro-management / meta, and more into unique strategies that only work with the exact items you have. Also, the slightly random nature of the technologies requires a player to design their own blueprints instead of downloading them from the internet if they want perfectly optimized blueprints matching their technologies’ stats.
Because you keep unlocking new things, you’ll never have a “final best strategy” and you need to keep learning if you want to consistently win, or just have fun and accept a lower rank / play against AI
Так же чтобы в игре могли не только убить но и отрубить руку и если пользователя не вылечат то он умрет, так же выколоть глаз но пользователь может не умереть а просто пол экрана не видеть, или достать или купить протез, если ногу тоже либо умреш либо будеш ползать либо на коляске котаться, или самое хорошее... поставить протез. Сохранятся можно...
P.S. Я джва года хочу такую игру.
i.e. scurry up trees, walk on wires between electric poles, jump on tree branches.
I imagine that there could be missions (find/collect nuts, fight/run away from dogs/cats, etc.) but it's mainly the "live the life of a squirrel" part that interests me the most.
So meditative/long form like Animal Crossing (bad comparison - but I mean, not clearly mission/objective-based), quirky like the Untitled Goose Game or one of those Llama simulators, but overall action-packed/FPV...?
Multiplayer could be fun as well.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/750200/AWAY_The_Survival_...
I guess Renegade might be what FPS looks like, but I'm unaware of a game that combines both.
Then DK Mobile happened and it's pretty clear we'll never see a good DK game again.
You start with a Space Invaders/Raiden Project type action game. You have a ship, you kill enemies, you get randomized loot from enemies, if you beat the level, you save the loot, you can upgrade your ship.
You also have a 'space base'- essentially a Farmville farm. You build turrets, harvest materials, expand with new buildings that let you do new things or gives new advancement options. You can collect pieces and combine them with your action loot to upgrade your ship or improve your base.
There's the async multiplayer component. You can "visit" other people's bases and attack them using your ship/action gameplay. If they destroy you, they get cool upgrade items when they log back in. If you destroy their base, they have to invest resources to rebuild it so it's harder next time.
TLDR: Think Farmville meets Space Invaders meets Tower Defense. It's still never been done to my satisfaction, and I think the time has passed for a game like that to be lucrative, but man... it could have been so great.
Perhaps just ahead of it's time?
I'd love a persistent, deeply simulated SimCity with cross-municipal boundary multiplayer elements.
A massive SimCity, with at least SimCity 4 level of complexity, without city tiles, like with a whole world simulation? Sign me up!
As for steroids, here's a tech demo of what I've been working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
I created a path finding algorithm that can simultaneously path 300,000 units to random destinations at a comfortable frame rate. Units can choose from any of the shortest paths between two points (there are many in a grid), and from those paths, can also choose the path that matches any preferences they have.
www.yesboxstudios.com for blogging about development if you prefer long form
This would be prone to manipulation, if someone were to change their PC's datetime, but would give the illusion that it's always running without actually doing so.
What I'd like to play, is a Hitman/Dishonored like Terminator game. You play as T-1000, you should avoid suspicion, shapeshift to gain access to restricted areas. You can do combat, but it should be avoided because it will make achieving your goals harder.
I want my street, my house, and general geography to matter in the game. Where is the hardware store? Army bases? Water?
The game starts with a limited infection, making police response to your murdering an infected neighbor problematic. The simulation models how agents would respond.
You win by killing all the zombies, whether that's year 1 or 10. If needed, that's 7 billion.
The exhaust could be a good city simulator, zombies off, which you sell to local governments.
Way back in the day there were two games, Lightspeed and the followup Hyperspeed. You can find them online if you look hard enough, and still run them in an emulator. They were So. Frigging. Fun.
The story is, humanity messed up Earth, so we need to colonize somewhere else. All of humanity is loaded on these ark ships, but you, the game player, are the advance team. Your job, upon arriving in a star sector, is to explore, find a suitable planet for the ark ship, and make the sector safe for humanity. The sector has existing politics that you'll have to figure out. Make alliances with some species, commit war on others. Find resources like water and metals, trade them with friendly species for the ones you need.
It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this game was so fun and engrossing. It might be because of how well it integrated half a dozen "mini games" into the larger one. As you're exploring the sector, all you get is a star map with distances. Run out of fuel? Sucks for you! So there's a mini-game of "optimal route planning". There's a mini-game of market trading, over time you can find arbitrage opportunities in how much different species value different resources. There's a mini-game of "flight sim dogfight" for when you need to use the big stick. &c. Also, plot, plot, plot, plot. None of it would work without someone creative sitting down and drawing out the epic tale of "what's going on" politically inside each star cluster.
I want another game like that.
You control the operator, who is pushing or riding a mower, and it's up to you to get complete coverage of the lawn area. You can upgrade your equipment over time (wider deck, better turn radius, etc). Extra points for more efficient coverage, and maybe some way to earn extra points for stylish mowing (good, even stripes on the diagonal, etc).
One day I'll get around to it...
2. An expanded and extended Autoduel/Car Wars as a modern video game. It would be RTS (or TBS) in the same vein as or based on GURPS Autoduel/Car Wars. A poor man's apocalyptic mech warrior but with wheels and 50 cals. Starting out with hopes and dreams to get a car, gain a team and working up to commanding a fleet of modified vehicles to scrounge the wasteland for resources, battle rival outposts / towns in road races/demolition derbies for such resources. Or more in the vein of Twisted Metal, just the fun of having modifying a car and swapping it out for better and better.
3. Update of the Archon chess-like game with high configuration of board and advancement for creatures. The combat would drop into 3d FPS, or PvP.
4. I have this recurring nightmare that I am a piece of bread that must escape the kitchen... nah.. nevermind. :)
You'd have some main antagonist haunting the mansion that you want to defeat, accessible in one of the rooms you need to discover. All throughout the mansion are artifacts that can make you stronger at defeating the boss, but picking up these artifacts usually triggers some haunting mechanic that makes general traversal through the mansion more difficult. One might turn the inanimate statues scattered throughout the mansion into active enemies. One might trigger a slenderman-type stalker mechanic. One might cause the mansion to start collapsing on itself, so each room starts losing floor tiles in ways that make some of them no longer traversible. One might rerandomize the layout of the mansion.
It becomes a balance of collecting enough powerful items to be able to defeat the boss, but not so many that the environment becomes too hostile to reach the boss at all, causing you to succumb to the mansion.
Then add a few other mechanics like events that autotrigger when you enter a room so it becomes not in your best interest to explore the entire mansion before you start collecting items.
I know that some games might fit this description, but I’m not committed enough to play a game that requires me to work my way up a social ladder or play the markets to stand a chance. ..looking at you, EVE online
There is a small but active multiplayer community. (Find it on the community Discord server.)
A replica of our planet, where you can play as either a hero or creature from ancient mythology. Your choice is limited by your location, so you can learn about the stories of cultures that previously inhabited your location.
Who or what you are affects the world around you, and players could join to expand their 'nation' into other countries, giving birth to new mythological creatures and heros based on how the cultures mix.
A giant but fun mythology lesson, effectively!
I envision kinda puzzle-inspired gameplay: use your skills to navigate the bullet hell, take out high-value enemies; then warp back to clear even more of the screen, or take on previously-unassailable obstacles.
I have lots of peripheral (and conflicting) ideas floating around the core mechanic. For example, maybe you could also spend your warp energy on a high-damage beam that connects your ship with a previous iteration, so you can sweep around the screen with it. Maybe some barriers or enemies can only be quickly destroyed by that beam; otherwise it takes ages and more skill than I possess. Maybe you can siphon your ghost runs so that they disappear before they actually warped back.
Every level should maaaaybe be possible to complete in a single run, if only just. I’m not sold on that though because it seems like it could limit the level design. There should definitely be some kind of bonus for completely clearing the level of all enemies, no matter how many times you have to warp. These two things are in tension.
The whole concept came to me after I played Braid, and from watching more skilled players shuffle their ships through the beautiful onscreen patterns that difficult bullet hell shooters tend to have, especially at the higher levels. I had a very barebones proof of concept of the main mechanic working at one point in FlashPunk, which tells you how long ago it was. I think the premise has some value though. I mean, I’d play it.
- Ground Control 3, or a good spiritual successor. I played this game a lot, especially when I was younger. I never really found something like it again. The gameplay was great, especially since I never really liked resource gathering in RTS. The completely free camera was great too, exploring the inside of buildings or being side by side with the units while they were fighting was a lot of fun. With a mission editor and a cooperative multiplayer (share unit control?), it would be perfect. The music was incredibly good too.
- Minecraft but actually made for modding. Having the updates of the game more like what Rimworld does (mostly backwards compatibly, opt in, actual gameplay content and not fluff). Right now it's always a bit of a pain, and it's easy to run into performance issues even on a small modded server.
- Better ways to find games. Right now I'm relying on searches (google & reddit, sometimes HN), word of mouth mostly from friends and the Steam queue (which itself is either terrible, or I'm too cynical about new games).
Edit: also, something new and unique by StreumOn. EYE: Divine Cybermancy is one of my favorite game ever, and I want more.
I want to play IRL role-playing games where the challenges are physical. Archery, swimming, hiking, treasure hunting, capture the flag, laser tag, city bicycle baton race.
It can be organized online and have leagues in major cities, with training weekly, minor events monthly, and larger events on quarterly and yearly timescales.
It would keep me active, help me meet friends, be extremely fun and engaging, and I actually want to do this.
Thinking of calling it Adventure League.
Something like Elite Dangerous so you can fly around it or visit the surface. (ED has rotating asteroid parking garages, maybe you can walk around them by now.)
Just something with realistic (!) scale, lighting, atmospheric effects etc., rather than just an arch painted across a skybox.
I feel like Pokémon go style games are massively underexploited.
Not just augmented reality but using cities as playgrounds. Nokia did some interesting things with this in the late 90s.
A fps might be problematic, but what about non violent trading (certain locations have mines etc, you can use resources to construct factories visible in augmented reality etc.) essentially a parallel world economy and reality that sits atop the physical word.
In other words, two AI "commanders" (perhaps along with separate AI "squad leaders") duke out the battle with the players being simply pawns. I've always imagined it in a WWII setting, but I suppose really any setting could work.
Imagine -- you spawn in, and your commander tasks your squad with taking control of a church in a nearby village. You and your fellow squad members enter the village and come under machine gun fire. A teammate tags the window where they saw the fire coming from. You all take cover, as the squad leader starts barking commands -- a few squad members stay back and start providing suppressing fire, while you and some others start advancing slowly, hopping from cover to cover. A teammate is hit, and another is tasked with dragging him to safety. You and the few others still advancing finally get to be in range to toss a grenade in that window. You peek from cover, grenade in hand... to see a tank rounding the corner down the road. You tag the tank, and chaos ensues as the squad leader screams at you to retreat. A mortar squad in a nearby section of the map is alerted to the tank and starts dropping mortars as you fall back to your original position, explosions and bullets flying all around you.
Your squad regroups, a few members down, but the strategy is adjusted and you go back in, eventually destroying the tank, capturing the church, and getting control of the village.
At the same time of this battle, similar battles are potentially unfolding in other parts of a larger map, as the attacking and defending commanders dynamically wage war.
Sometimes I want to think strategy in games, but sometimes I just want to shoot stuff. I think if executed properly this could strike a good balance of both reaching meaningful objectives and also focusing on dynamic, moment-to-moment action. Games like Squad can be great -- if you can find a good squad leader or group to play with consistently. As I get older I find I don't really have time for that, and the probability of getting matched with a good squad leader by chance is pretty low. The setup of this game minimizes the risks of poor teamplay and makes the "Squad" sort of experience more accessible.
It may be better for AI to control both strategy and most of the units, and let the players take over.
Alternatively I think if it were configured in such a way where one team was explicitly attacking and the other explicitly defending it might work out ok as I had envisioned it... though I think that would come with its own problems.
The other player plays the environment and tries to smite the first player and thwart their escape attempt by creating deadly natural disasters along the way, but can’t directly attack or interact with the other player.
Players are scored based on how far the escapee gets through the board and how quickly the environment kills the other player.
An escaping player might want to quickly parkour between buildings by jumping the gap between the roofs. However, if the environment player had already clicked the ground and planted a tree between the buildings, they could then call down lightning on to the tree to fry the jumping escapee. The escapee might then try to climb down the building to walk under the tree before climbing back to the roof to sprint over the tops of buildings again. Picking a more exposed path with fewer obstacles lets the escapee move more quickly but also offers less protection from the environment.
It’d be a two-player competitive side scrolling action game, where one player controls the course environment, which is something I’ve never seen before.
I've been wanting this mechanic in a side-scrolling or third-person beat-em-up.
2. Something like Life is Strange, but with a game time of 2-3 weeks where the NPCs actions and responses intelligently evolve over time, leading to even larger choice branches.
3. Anything Mongol related.
4. Truly immersive language learning game, where you can learn a language from NPCs at any time period in history: Tang dynasty China, Heian Japan, etc.
- Player plays as either the emperor or the central gov
- Takes a faction mode: each faction may control a few positions in the gov and in military. Each may also control certain economic interests. Each faction has its own opinion for each matter so they may agree on one thing but disagree on another. Each faction also have children factions but they may switch loyalty if too much conflict of interests.
- Delay of information: information has speed and tech advance will increase the speed. But essentially it's difficulty for the central to directly control everything so they have to send officials. But there are complications: 1) Locals might want their own officials, 2) Official belong to certain faction and his appointment is usually a compromise
- Every policy moves through the land tree with a speed and may be blocked if the locals or governor dislikes it. As the Emperor or the central you need to find ways to move policies to as many places as possible.
I feel like this model represents the real world more or less and are far superior than even the most complicated strategy games. But it's very difficult to build.
I'd like some really good extensions to the basic model:
- endgame planets are kinda all the same. Specific resources to make them more interesting? Pick different ways of customizing the world?
- Civ resources get "revealed" on the map when a relevant tech needing them appears. This changes the balance of power / usefulness of cities/worlds. MOO2 had deep mining. MOO1 only kind of has this with techs that enable landing on previously uninhabitable worlds.
- a 3d map, and more varied navigation challenges than the binary is / is not in nebula. Black holes? subspace barriers?
- wormholes that appear/are discoverable would change the topology mid-game as well. Or parallel universes with different accessibilities. precursor stargates.
- kind of like how "builds" are done in rpgs, techs or culture can change the fundamental properties/abilities of your race.
- trade sucks in almost all 4x I've seen, yet it is a dominant concern in real life.
- visible worlds, brown dwarfs and other usable systems often aren't visible until you get close. Stars hidden by gas clouds, etc. Hidden outer worlds like nemesis.
- a little bit of surface customization, MOO2's/civ-style buildings is... ok, but a bit overdone and lends itself to "build everything on the big planets". Maybe terraforming sections of the planet in specific ways is better. Might be too much detail.
It would be fun to tinker with RoTP and 1oom when I get the chance.
Almost at Dwarf Fortress + space + no man's sky + 4x at this point.
Whatever country you live in, the city this occurs in is the largest, most local that also experiences earthquakes. A magnitude 9 quake hits, pretty much leveling the city. The entire earthquake itself is a massive pre-calculated physically accurate simulation of what that city would actually experience, including at least a week of after quakes.
The first game level is simply surviving the quake. Where ever you are, your situation is different, but it’s all playing out in “bullet time” - slower than normal with visual streaks from motions. The initial quake is at least 1 minute long, 5–10 minutes in “bullet time”. After a quake ends, time is normal, but every aftershock it’s “bullet time” again.
If you die, you died this incarnation of the game. If you died an impossible to recover death, you get randomly assigned a new identity. If your death was preventable, you live that same life again. If you are trapped, you are trapped and you must get someone’s attention to rescue you, while whatever injuries you’ve received accumulate against your life reserve keeping you alive. If you survive, what you do next is up to you.
The game starts over every day/hour or whatever frequency makes sense, playing out until the last person quits/dies or the after quakes end, about a week of simulation time. It’s massively multi-player.
It’s like “Groundhog’s Day”, the movie, but with life or death circumstances for everyone. There’s modding capabilities for people to implement objects, so EMT techs, police, criminals, and everyday people’s various tools actually operate.
Due to the open ended capability of modding, there might be a need for a separate ‘Earthquake in Alice’s Wonderland’ after a while, but the game needs to be created first.
A separate, parallel mini-game is the ‘outside journalists’: an excuse for people to create ‘news clips’ of themselves or any other player’s activities framed in a “news reporter over the shoulder explainer” clip. These are fed into a teaser streaming channel anyone can view, playing the game or not.
FWIW, I left the game industry. So, if you want to make this game, please do.
Struggling to keep track of how to run through all the conversations. I did find this tool which helps zoom into sub-threads. https://trungdq88.github.io/hn-big-threads/index.html
Any other tool recommendations?
And more coop games with story.
The original and the second title are great fun, but don't have as much a defined story.
Only partially joking. The story continuation was such a letdown I personally consider it not-yet-made.
That's probably not what you wanted, but in slightly similar vein, the indie title "Unepic" had a very neat collection of mechanics and skills which were largely left untapped due to what seems to have been the developer failing in patience/endurance in the second half. One of those features was a quite extensive ability to put things on keybindings. Which brings me to my only suggestion which might actually be on topic:
What if you were to put a lot of effort into making the interface easy to customize, deeply, preferably live. Then you'd push the players to use it, possibly creating something of a game mechanism in coping with disparate tasks in the process. Also encourage publishing and forking. I'm not sure it even matters much whether it's a global defense simulator, platformer or sim (and indeed, why not all of them and more), but I'd be very interested to see what it evolves into.
Both Valheim and V Rising have sold millions off nothing but word of mouth and a hunger for the genre.
Also, more scope for political economic choices, in particular state owned enterprises, cooperatives, etc. There's real world evidence they behave differently in how they invest, weather recessions, and so on.
It'd be neat to be able to build trade links with different partner countries who have ideological outlooks, too.
Games like League of Legends, Overwatch, DotA, etc. are amazing in terms of their strategic depth, variety, and power fantasy. However, the culture around them consistently gets to a narrow-minded, unfun state. What's needed is something like the ideal of "sportsmanship" in real-life sports.
Sometimes, though, some people in our scene (South Africa dota players) will start up the FACEIT pickup hub and we'll have ~100 somewhat active people playing in a more serious league that lasts a couple months before things peter out. I much prefer that over typical ranked dota, even if things still sometimes get messy.
2 player local co-op. Shoot em up. Top down. One player drives a tank with a forward facing gun, controls gun and countermeasures too. Other player controls the turret, main gun, and missiles. You roam around and baddies drive/fly at you in random patterns and with random tactics. No fixed attack patterns!
Another one: side-on party co-op qwop fighting game. One pair of people per combatant. One person controls legs, the other controls arms.
And another: strategy game where combat is resolved by solving word and math problems. Can handicap one player by giving them harder puzzles, so a 10 year old could fight a 50 year old.
Another: top down space shooter. Co-op, players' ships are tethered together and can swing each other around, think Asteroid style boosts. Powerups can change tether attributes, players can combo together for more powerful attacks.
Not saying they're good ideas, just ideas!
For example, when picking berries you would have to balance them on the palm of your hand and they would roll around. If you dropped them you would have to chase after and recollect them before dropping them off at the mill. There would also be a possibility an insect might try and attack you, you you poke your finger on a thorn. There could be some type if points system and high score system that could be involved for these mini games.
I couldn't see this game as being enjoyable or entertaining for more then a few minutes, but I like the idea of RTS games being played from a FPS perspective and I like the the idea of less serious arcade style games.
Yes timesplitters was close but not quite!
1. A random point on a random map is selected and populated with objects to make it a mail delivery objective.
2. The player flies there and faces random enemy aircraft or vehicles en-route or in the objective area.
3. The player needs to survive and land to deliver the mail, and is awarded points for hits on enemies and successful landing criteria like how many pieces are missing from the airplane.
4. Expanding this to cooperative missions, points are divided between players, and bonuses are applied when both survive and land successfully.
5. Daily custom missions are published (like Noita’s daily runs) that players can try once, and since games like IL-2 have excellent mission recording features, it would be entertaining to see the final 5-to-10 seconds automatically recorded with the option of sharing the way you lost one of your wheels on landing.
More info: https://hypertexthero.com/combat-air-mail/
Imagine one player is playing a game like Total War Three Kingdoms, and on the same team your friends are playing something like Dynasty Warriors. So you are doing all the high level RTS control while your friends are actually fighting on the front lines.
There has been games that have come close but all the ones I've tried have really lacked depth on either the RTS side (you only control maybe 30 units) or the first / third person side. The technical issue is you have to create almost two separate games and sync / balance them.
I just think it would be so cool to be playing a game controlling thousands of units and your friends happen to just be 3 or 4 of them. You could make it either Dynasty Warrior style where your friends are far stronger than normal units or something like Arma where you can die from one stray bullet no different than any other AI unit.
Setting could be medieval, fantasy, space, or modern military. Wouldn't really matter to me.
I would settle for the omega man.
Two sides, each side has 100 to 500 people, and the map is the size of 10 WOW zones. The game lasts some limited amount of time, with some forcing function similar to the shrinking map in Fortnight.
There are all the different kind of activities you may perform in an MMO; Dungeons, mobs, quests, crafting; You start as level one and you could play the entire thing PVE solving quests or you can be PVP or somewhere in between as like a rogue that is sabotaging the other side. But everything you do helps your side or hurts the other side. Every quest you do may gain resources for your side or help your army grow bigger, or help arm your team. (You could go find special weapons, or just gain resources to help all people on your team get progressively bigger weapons).
It would include the rocketry part, spacewalks, airlock operation, moon car, etc.
You play against your two selves, and flip back and forth between two modes. In "mayor" mode you have the birds-eye view and you are trying to build a functioning and safe city for your citizens.
Then at any time you can flip to "street" view, where you are no longer mayor, but a criminal leader. Here you are trying to expand your criminal network and evade police.
If the "mayor" your reduces crime to near 0 then doing anything as the "mobster" you will be extremely difficult. If the "mobster" you is super successful then the mayor has a very poor rating, and citizens complain of crime. This should also have physical change to the look of the city as well (graffiti, car's on blocks on the streets, cars with smashed windows, stores with smashed windows, or boarded up, parks generally trashed).
Control the environment. Ressourcen and parameters.
Seed bugs.
Have an timedial to speed up time into the future. See how they evolve and if they survive / become dominant spieces.
Could include winning challenges that some seeds of bugs might from an in game or other players competing spieces.
Should invovle "real" artificial evolution. Mutation rate als adjustable.
I love evolution games, not enough of them out there.
Combine that game with Starcraft/Command and Conquer. A side scrolling 2D RTS game.
Two sides, a river in the middle. Build up your base (which would extend underground as well as horizontally) and build Helicopters, jets, missles/nukes, tanks, boats (which you can manually take control of at any time).
Goal is to take out the "Leader" of the other side. If you've played Choplifter you know the "people" were tiny little squishy things that you could kill by just landing on. Your workers and soldiers and Leader are all extremely vulnerable squishy guys. Of course defensively you'd position your "leader" as deep underground as possible, or in a building surrounded by anti-aircraft missiles, etc.
Mainly a 2 player, 1 vs1 game, but more than 2 players possible if the world wrapped around.
Great RTS Star Trek games, but the license got lost in beancounter hell at some point. Can't even buy the old games anymore
E: oh damn 2 is on GOG now. That's my weekend sorted! https://www.gog.com/game/star_trek_armada_ii
All we have had so far is Europa Universalis with a space skin. Nothing can ever travel faster than light, that's how the world actually works. Children of a Dead Earth was in the direction of what I want but I got bored quickly because it's orbital dynamics puzzles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Selection_(video_game)
I keep thinking about a mech based ARPG where you can attach different components to your mech that grant different passive/active abilities. Maybe different mech styles that have different passive abilities, but, in the spirit of Path of Exile, the components you equip are not limited by class.
I'm just tired of all ARPGs doing Gothic fantasy horror type stuff when there's so many unexplored options that could revitalize the genre. Give me lightsabers instead of swords, guns instead of bows, and drones instead of totems. Let me fight in cities and spaceships instead of villages and castles. There's just so much you can do with Sci fi.
Doesn't go as far as what you're imagining, but it's a step in the right direction...
Graal Online, Maplestory, Terraria, Starbound, Minecraft (there are a few clones already), Rust, CS:GO, Super Smash Bros, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Rockman.exe, maybe something like Prototype or Ultimate Spider-Man with fun physics so you can swing around and do whatever.
A free recreation of Graal Online would be especially cool as the content was all player-made with the available development tools. They just let the PC version of the game wither and die. If someone just made a solid base, a community could form to make the actual stuff to do. I've heard people compare Graal to BYOND/SS13, although I never experienced those. There's SS14 now, but it seems pretty focused on... space station stuff. I don't know that it's similar enough to Graal for me.
An interesting concept actually occurred to me on this same idea, albeit still sort of blocked by the first thing -- what if this or an engine like it were moddable on purpose?
An open set of tools for generating character data or making engine customizations could actually open up a lot of possibilities around more easily implementing roster additions or even just enabling total conversions that are less likely to get DMCA'd.
the idea of having multiple games, each with its own separate playstyle (and therefore player demographic), that are connected somehow by a shared economy and game-world, is endlessly fascinating to me, and I don't know why more attempts at this have been made yet, aside from obvious design complexity issues.
It has an incredibly rich and varied terrain, with many iconic animals, great beauty, and many cultures (including their histories and mythologies). It'd make an amazing setting.
I don't know why sub-Sahara isn't used in games.
Funny enough I’ve been doing some west African CK3 campaigns lately. There’s a much larger diversity of religions and cultures which make for a fun challenge and there are also some fun, not too difficult formables in the region.
- We're talking things like skill trees.
- Levels that take hardcore amounts of time to master (think like the original runescape)
- Actual good game play at higher rounds (all zombie games have this problem -- there is not enough built into the game for the player to keep going at higher rounds)
- Weapons and abilities that don't follow standard physics with weapons and hence require skill to master beyond pointing at enemies.
One thing that is really great about zombies is you have to decide how to spend your points to stay alive. Do you buy a specific power up now or wait? should you buy this weapon or save up? I think it would be cool if there were even more choices to make. These simple decisions have so many consequences that make every game unique. It's honestly really cool game design.
Team based, but also squad based with a squad leader and various roles + vehicles.
Infantry died when they started charging (a subscription IIRC), they lost the player base, then they reverted but made it if you paid you got better armour (pay to win). Basically management killed it.
Insanely fun game, a modernised version of this with a much larger scale (say 200v200) and a commander on each team would be excellent I'm sure of it! EG, Battlefield or Hell Let Loose but far more accessible/arcade style and isometric.
I am absolutely convinced this would be a successful game!
Ideally, everyone sits in the same room. The shared information, basically the board in a boardgame, will be displayed on a common screen. Think a ChromeCast on the wall or a iPad or laptop on the coffee table.
Your private information, basically your hand of cards or so, is displayed on your smartphone. Similar for all other players. Your phone is also where you input your moves.
This setup would fix multiple problems I am having when playing boardgames:
(1) played with cardboard bits, they are expensive to purchase, and you have to do all the tracking and 'calculation' by hand.
(2) played on phone screens only, the screen is tiny and crowded with information and there's not much shared experience apart from sitting in a room together.
(3) more importantly than just making existing game concepts more convenient, this setup allows you to make boardgame-like experiences with novel designs. Especially you can press the mechanism of simultaneous play much harder, while still allowed for interaction.
For a simple example, look at Codenames https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178900/codenames
With the computer as an arbiter, the two teams can essentially play simultaneously. And only the team leaders even need private screens / phones. (You will probably want to synchronize a bit. Eg you still have turns, but both teams can do one turn each simultaneously; then they both start the next turn simultaneously etc.)
Slightly related: I'm also really impressed by https://spyfall.adrianocola.com/ because they managed to make a computer-supported version of Spyfall, but you only need to interact with the computer once at the start of the game. Afterwards, it's all analog.
I have to give them a try.
Too many futuristic games happen in some zombie-infested radioactive wasteland or give up on this world entirely and move on to surviving on another hostile planet. I find this depressing.
I want to be immersed in the lore and feel part of it
If it does exist, please point me in the right direction; if it doesn't, let's build it!
Of course, there must be a tie-in with some racing game that lets you test drive your track if you wish.
- beautiful & detailed pixel art (like Stardew, Hyper Light Drifter, Owlboy)
- many, amazing non-combat skills (like a tale in the desert, osrs)
- large community with many worlds / servers / regions
- holiday events
Ever now and again I go hunting for this sort of game and come up short.
Start with some foundational spells, traditionally that would be elemental spells but one could imagine those spell based on the physics engine to manipulate objects. For example, the three first spells could be Force, Mass, and Acceleration(perhaps having some cryptic word associated with them). Just using a keyword might apply a "buff" to your character, making it "stronger", "heavier", or "faster". The fun part of course would be to compose them e.g. `acceleration . mass` to inflict damage by ramming into an opponent.
I imagine the skill tree to be divided into language features and "spells"(those being associated with elements of the underlying engine). As an example, the player could unlock "variables" on one side and "Other", the ability to apply effects to objects other than yourself, on the other side. Everything limited by the resources of the player. Maybe a "magic book" system with limited space forcing you to golf your spells to put more of them in one book (therefore having more spell available out of your workshop). Engine-related spells would be limited by the player's mana. Spells could scale via the level of fundamental spells composing them. Self-applying spells could have a constant cost, while "other-applying" spells could raise the amount of mana required depending on the distance.
Actually, I don't think I would even want to fight in that game so there should be a way to level up by creating spells alone. Maybe link "XP" to an in-game object, "mana stone"-like, and make it available by fighting monsters and quests or merchants Building some kind of github-like market of spells outside of the game would create a nice community feel. The game could perhaps be multiplayer, making an in-game spell market more relevant, but the potential to break the game (figuratively and literally) makes that very hard to imagine.
I'd make that but I have to start "finishing" side projects instead of just starting new ones. Also I don't know anything about game dev
Secondly, I miss the glass map on CSS.
Zombies is still around. These three games, & Last Chaos MMOPRG (before the new map update) were my go-tos. Zombies %10, hosties %80, Glass %11, and Last Chaos %9 (although constantly when I got into Last Chaos). There's an extra %10 in there but simply rebalance them lol.
As a side point, camping in the vents on the olympics maps for CSS hosties jailbreak map, before people found out you could aim for the corner vent, was also incredibly fun.
I'm aware of: - an FTL mod (unfinished?), - Tachyon (work in progress?), - Undercrewed (a bit too much arcade/action and kind of short), - Among Us (but that betrayal aspect...) - Interstellar Rift (closest but too grindy, too long, the encounters leave much to be desired particularly from the perspective of a crewed ship) - Space Engineers (but requires too much understanding of how and why the ship works for some people, and doesn't really have a "series of encounters" mode I'm aware of) - Star Citizen (TBD...)
Also, just generally that co-op games would support more than 4 players.
Creative and new/fresh puzzle designs would keep your gold safe, meanwhile on attack you’d have to really plan and think how to move forward. There was pvp and pve, and I never felt the need to grind hours and hours because 1 good defense or attack felt rewarding.
RIP. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mighty_Quest_for_Epic_Lo...
One idea I've been kicking around is to have some sort of disincentive to posting in-game discoveries online. For example, the usefulness or power of an item is inversely proportional to how many instances of the item have been found. Not sure if this is really feasible in practice though.
Parameters would be things like the probability distribution of various characteristics such as aggression, intelligence, passivity, individuality and so on.
There would also be environmental factors for the planet, the availability of various resources etc.
I feel that war is the inevitable way that groups work out who is boss until we sort out some sort of world government and I worry that we never will because our nature doesn't allow it.
I know that such a simulation would be useless because of not being based on any accepted model but it would still be interesting to try.
A game version of Threads
You run a country in the run up to a nuclear war, decide on whether to attack first or wait and retaliate, survive in your bunker and get to run the county for the next 10 to 20 years
Like a long term version of Defcon.
Think a 'crazy taxi' RPG where you fly to deliver parcels instead of passengers.
You would have to deal with issues like weather conditions, weight vs. travel time; and occasionally race against competing witches.
It's honestly a 'take my money' situation - I've considered doing it as a fan game, but I would need a small team, and of course we wouldn't be able to profit from it. I'd ultimately love to see it adopted into even a mobile game.
It would be an open world, but not pvp...maybe you support co-op but I think the novelty would lie in single player combo'd with a very dynamic cause and affect world
BHL is the perfect action adventure RPG, I just want more of it. A more expansive campaign, more plot lines, more character classes and abilities. I go back and play through BHL every 6 months or so and have done since it came out.
A sequel to the original Star Wars MMORPG. Rather than an MMO, it might actually be better as a survival game, ala ARK, Rust, or Conan Exiles. A smaller scale might make it possible to do more interesting things with the engine.
There seems to be nothing like it since - combat with large complex ships where everything is about power management, positioning, and strategically targeting the components of other vessels.
Divert power to shields? Your weapons recharge slower. Divert power to engines? Other systems are hampered linearly. Fighting a fast ship? Target their engines. It’s tough to describe because there’s no games out there that come close.
The mod community over the years ported nearly every sci-fi ship out there from Star Wars, Stargate, BSG, etc and actually made some effort to balance them.
Edited for clarity
I really liked the first half of Fahrenheit so more in that style (without the QTEs if possible) would be nice.
For example, a game where you manage the international ingress at an airport. You design the queuing patterns, decide how many booths to staff, what to ask the travelers. You're rated on speed, cost, and so on. Think Papers, please, but instead of working one booth you're managing the whole airport, or maybe all airports across the country.
Or managing a post office. Again, you'd have multiple conflicting goals, and you have to navigate many tradeoffs.
The problem would be striking a balance between an accurate simulation and something that's not excruciatingly boring to play.
Because the "planets" are so small, gravity and Coriolis forces influence projectiles: hitting the enemy often requires shooting over the horizon, or relying on the planet's rotation so your spear lands in the right place.
Running fast or jumping off a tall structure can put you into low orbit. Planet sizes range from about the volume of a house to the volume of a skyscraper. Planet shape influences your tactics - cube planets have less gravity near the corners, spinning ringworlds let you jump from one side to the other, etc.
Super Mario Galaxy plus Fortnite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_2000
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4850/Cossacks_Back_to_War...
I guess Starcraft is the current good RTS but I find it a bit too much. Maybe it's nostalgia but I found those games a lot more approachable and fun to play. I guess I want Starcraft but set in real world.
Maybe something like this already exists?
You take on the role of an operator (e.g. Tank) from 'The Matrix' movies to guide your team through an operation (recon, retrieve, destroy, etc... standard mission types). You have a large-scale but limited resolution view of the world where you can spot hazards if you're attentive (because they may only be briefly visible) and advise your team how to proceed (avoid, engage, abort, ...). I'm thinking of a text console oriented game, you type commands to send to the team (which they could follow, ignore, or misinterpret) rather than selecting and controlling them directly.
Other than that, I'd really like to get a game based on Mistborn. I think the allomancy mechanics could be very fun in a video game.
The closest thing I've seen is "traits" developed by leaders in games from paradox.
1st example: Stellaris, or Xcom. However, traits are limited to being bonuses. They arent part of telling a story.
A more interesting use case was traits in crusader kings 2. There, traits, are somewhat part of the story. However, said traits are most often the result of player decisions, vs player strategy or actions.
Since Stardew was created by a single (obviously very talented) dev, I always feel like I could get a first pass at this done, but free time is always an issue!
I hate how all this cool games have just a handful of maps that players learn by heart up to specific angles, locations, sounds and timings.
When we played Quake in lan parties we had a mappack of thousands of maps and played on one map only for some time, rarely ever comming back to the maps we already played.
This rewarded quick orientation and finding cool rewarding elements of each map quickly before your opponent manages to adapt.
In MOBA or RTS games additional thing might be the fog of war so you need to scout the new random map to find out what's there.
I have to credit GT in inspiring the direction of my career. I wish there were more games like it.
I love the idea of bouncing around people at a cocktail party, trying to deduce some important secret that no individual will reveal, at least not unless you act that you already know. Maybe you've gatecrashed some kind of Hannibal Lecter party, and everyone but you knows who the next victim is, so you have to discover who/where/when and prevent it.
Maybe it was getting super effecient with just a few keyboard shortcuts to select all X on the screen and things like that.
Maybe it's because I enjoyed populus on the Amiga..
but any way - it was fun to play single player vs computer and fun to play against other humans. Can't recall if we ever did LAN playing or not, but should.
I would buy copies if it was out today and try to get others to play it as well.
2) Game mechanics should violate your expectations more.
3) More variations on theme see https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/...
most games operate in a very narrow rangen of expectations that lead to a staid and predictable experience. Almost all first-person games suffer from this sort of homogenization.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the...
Don't know why they never really merged adventure games with FPS graphics...
Bonus points for multiplayer mode, hand-to-hand weapons, and just a little more granularity in the hand-to-hand combat engine (when Barrabas would hold you up in the air dangling for a full second before uppercutting you into the stratosphere, it always seemed like you should have been able to kick him in the face). Decent enemy AI would be important (Oni's was not especially good).
- take photos of animals/plants/fungi, upload them to iNaturalist, and submit a correct identification in order to "capture" them.
- the initial CP of your "captured pet" is determined by the most granular, correct identification you can make before other iNaturalists chimed in.
- synergies for collecting "pets" within the same taxon group or with known mutualistic symbiosis
- virtual battles between "pets", with special relative strengths/weaknesses depending on some kind of "domain" of the pets.
- A remake of Sid Meier's Pirates! But with realtime action basically Mount and Blade but at sea.
- A realistic wilderness survival sim without silly supernatural or horror elements, the point is just to stay alive and either get rescued or walk out
[Edit with more thoughts] - WW1 aerial combat sim (basically Red Baron with modern graphics)
- Subnautica but set in space perhaps the wreckage of a space station in an astroid belt
You create a set of complex processes/tactical moves that is then simulated by computers to play against other players. This could be a small team in something like call of duty, where you choose your bots equipment, and decisions they would make for scouting/in combat/etc. Then the teams of bots play against other players bots to see who wins. You can then review footage of your bots against other teams to identify weaknesses and "re-program" them to try again. Leaderboard are how you see progress.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/98200/Frozen_Synapse/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/248610/Door_Kickers/
(They both have sequels too)
Once selected, these are locked in and concludes what both sides have to work with. If the villagers don't have the right tool set(s), it may be impossible for them to win.
From there, it's all about defining the powers of both sides.
If you're an open minded nerd, I highly recommend this is like 10 hour board game. It's an excellent detox from your laptop, a balance of hardcore strategy and fun, and great way to socialize with a committed crew.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233078/twilight-imperium...
Also a massive, singular world where people who were playing an FPS, people playing Railroad Tycoon, and people playing flight sims were all playing simultaneously in the same MMO world.
Basically you get N actions per day (3, 5, 7, whatever works) that depend on your characters age. You might start as a baby in some random family archetype (poor/rich, dumb/smart, lazy/athletic, etc.) and after a few years you get control of the daily decisions your character makes at a granular level. Like, study in the morning, play in the afternoon, watch TV in the evening. These are more "influences" and your character can kind of rebel. Like if it gets too stressed because you are forcing it to study/work all the time then the character has a stress break and maybe gets drunk in the evening.
As the character gets older the available tasks change. As a toddler its games and light-learning, as a pre-teen it is school and sports/hobbies, as a teen it is education and social activities, as a young adult part-time jobs or university, as an adult marriage, raising kids. Perhaps as you get older you get more actions e.g. N actions per day increases.
Eventually you get to retirement then death and then you can choose one of your kids to continue the legacy. Or you can start over with a new random kid in a random family.
The gameplay would be simply choosing one of a few options available to your character at each time step. So you have N time steps per day and M available actions. The M actions are chosen in a weighted random manner from a set based on your characters abilities which changes over time, maybe some light RPG skill tree system. Could possibly be managed with a "card" system as well and would possibly shoe horn into Slay the Spire type mechanics. Overtime both positive abilities and negative abilities compound. Like, if you have too many "curse" cards in your deck, maybe your only options for an evening decisions are "drink alcohol", "ruminate on past failures", "argue with spouse".
In some sense, think of it like the day-to-day mechanics in Persona 5 mixed with the character building of The Sims. The goal of the game is to make many lifestyles possible. e.g doctor, lawyer, rockstar, president, social worker, janitor, game developer, soldier. The more difficult job types (e.g. CEO of a massive corporation, Senator) might take multiple generations to work towards.
Seems like a complex thing to model. One of the turning points of the battle was a flight of American dive bombers which followed the wake of a Japanese destroyer to the aircraft carriers. The destroyer had fallen behind while engaging the American submarine Nautilus.
The outcome of Midway was determined by an intelligence trick: a planted plaintext message about the condition of the desalination plant at Midway island. I wonder how you'd model that sort of thing. Also, there was an incident where an outbound US attack squadron eyeballed an incoming Japanese attack force. What are the chances of that, and how do you model it?
In general, modelling intelligence seems to be hard; I've neveer seen it tried, except in a very abstract way.
Do submarines count? If so, then yes.
An important detail of the battle of midway was the Japanese didn’t think the American carriers were present. If they knew from the get go then the out come very likely would’ve been different. I.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Santa_Cruz_Isl...
In the game, the Japanese would not be surprised.
I think the concept could work. Just choose a different battle. :)
P.S. If you’re into this stuff this is a must read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Sword
There is still a problem that we know where the American forces were and when they were encountered. Probably would need an option for an ahistorical start, where the American carriers could navigate from Pearl to a different location off of Midway.
Further options: allow the Japanese to have Shokaku and Zuikaku participate in the battle (assume they were not damaged in the Battle of Coral Sea); allow the Japanese to structure their attacking fleet differently; etc
A Member of a civilization near the heat death of the universe:
Live has flourished throughout the universe for the last 100 Billions of years, but the only things that are inevitable are taxes and the heat death. How do you cope with the dying of everything? Gain energy by evaporating stars near a galaxy size black hole. Embrace the infinite darkness or join a cult that exits the universe through a ring-singularity into a new big bang.
I'm talking dragons like Rayquaza from Pokemon.
If someone doesn't build this then someday I'll learn some C++ so that I can build it myself.
There's been some efforts to release modern versions of the game; some rewrites in Java, at least one browser game. None took off.
You can 'watch' shows if you like, and have your group(s) play with friends' bands or set up package tours.
also: - battle of the bands / showcases for new groups - oregon-trail style tour issues
Elite Dangerous fulfilled that for me. Nicest community of players I've ever seen but the company in charge of the game is doing a terrible job managing it. They dropped console support for the game and I just lost all interest.
I've heard good things about No Man's Sky and the company developing it... I'm thinking I should try it.
Also, I know it's very bad taste right now, but... a game taking place in Azovstal, with the underground faithfully modeled.
I would love an RPG set in some world like Gibson’s sprawl trilogy. For example an open world game where you had to make deals, do biz, and of course hack anything. I feel like the world of a dystopian cyberpunk just has so much to explore, from how giant corporations would operate to the way cyberspace would look and feel.
Something like Skyrim but cyberpunk. That would be really amazing
And by "sequel", I mean incremental improvements to the game mechanics, and more content. Not a complete reimagining.
The Hitman series has been very good at not trying to reinvent itself each time. The first sequel to Deus Ex however is probably the biggest disappointment in gaming history. Baldur's Gate 3 seems to have nothing in common with BG2. The look, the feel, the mechanics… Everything that made it compelling. Gone.
I would like to see they try to remake or just remastering of Deus ex 1, so it can be a good introduction to new players in the existing world established in the original, to make a new sequel ignoring Invisible war.
The fact that real life locations carried that game for so long is so sad because it could've had so much potential if the game was designed to be a game. You know, fun.
You should've been able to have actual battles instead of just spamming the screen. You should've been able to go to heal at Pokemon centers.
They should've taken all the proven game mechanics of the original games and adapted them properly
Games beyond click-throughs, simplified turn-based games, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, the 900th iterations of crosswords/hangman/sudoku/etc, would be nice.
Intellectually, emotionally and/or aesthetically satisfying low-skill games are what I want, I guess.
Best ever: MoO 2 [0].
Latest installment: MoO - Conquer the stars [1], or MoO 4.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion_II:_Battle_at_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion:_Conquer_the_S...
Highly recommend it!
I'd love a simple, animation-free Risk game like that, but with much better AI players to play against, and with different maps one can play.
Modern Risk games are way too flashy, and worse, they take so much time between turns to display multiple screens and animations.
I was also thinking a game where the microphone must be on where you need to coordinate with other players as quietly as possible to achieve some objective (sort of a video game version of A Quiet Place).
But mostly, I scratch my gaming itch with boardgamearena
Morrowind: Ability to join the 6th house with an alternate ending where you get to destroy the gods by piloting Akulakhan.
Oblivion: For the Shivering Isles DLC, the option to become Jyggalag (instead of Sheogorath 2.0) and take on all of the island's inhabitants.
Skyrim: Have the Forsaken as a joinable faction for the civil war, become a Briar-Heart, team up with a Hagraven companion NPC.
Specifically, I'd like people to be able to use something like the StarCraft map editor to design and build whole complexes and progressions of dungeons through which they and others can play (and potentially compete).
Ideally, the classes themselves could be customized/buildable.
Whenever you are trapped by the spider you get to enjoy the fully-immersive experience only VR can deliver of being eaten alive by a spider! Fun for the whole family!!
Just make the game fun for both of us, I'll play almost any genre (except violence).
New good space shooter a la Freespace. The recent star wars one was alright.
More Descent - Played reloaded and it was awesome!
Jak and Daxter, Croc, all narrative adventure games i loved when i was younger. that genre doesn't seem to get much development anymore. indie games of them are somewhat unpolished.
Subnautica was the perfect survival game. really good at striking the balance between casual but fun with nice story. and gorgeous!
There was a similar game called Tremulous much later, but I never ended up playing that.
No Man's Sky is ok, but the alien life is mostly focused on lower intelligence animals, and base building feels clunky relative to what you can do in games like RimWorld or prison architect.
I've thought about learning unity to do this, but I have not had the time.
A game that requires people to utilise the dirty politics strategies in order to win, thus making it obvious to the layer how politics actually works.
Things going badly for you? Start a war.
Some bad news in the media cycle? "Throw a dead cat on the table" (look that one up if you don't know what it means).
Have to agree to something? Agree but don't do it.
Need to win an election? Make empty promises.
Saw the playthrough on youtube, though. Looks like a lot of fun.
VR mode where you can fight first person as a unit in a cohort.
Perhaps not the grind.
But the high fantasy atmosphere is something I wish I could experience again.
One thing I've loved is their concept of Leagues. I would love a game like OSRS that has a persistent mode and a sort of seasonal Leagues type mode.
Also a game with improved running mechanics. Running feels awful compared to other games you can play these days.
And improved PvP; the wilderness is a cool concept, but I think it would work better to have a duplicate world "underneath" the regular world that's the exact same but with faster xp and rewards along with the risk of player killers.
Also better afk-ability, since the game is meant to be played over extended periods of time.
Supported macro-ability and better inventory management?
These things will never end up in OSRS because they'll ruin the way the game has been played, but I really want a game that checks these boxes.
There was an attempt, called "Spellsworn", which flopped very hard. Battlerite was also somewhat similar, but more cluttered and degraded very quickly.
It doesn't even have to be fantasy-based, in fact, I would like even more a successor to Comet Busters versus mode.
As you progress, the system goes from really simple songs and rhythms and gets increasingly complicated until you are sight-reading a semi-random song at the final boss.
Bonus points if you feed this into an MMO so that people have to genuinely cooperate to take down the big bad.
Would have 2 teams, of 100s of persons on each side. There'd be a general for each side who would oversee a tactical map and give orders to units. But these units are the rest of the team members, so each engagement on the map is being fought real-time by real people!
So Rise of Nations for the general and Battlefield 1942 for the troops...
The game becomes an FPS/RTS Hybrid, with you in command of a vehicle, simultaneously issuing orders to your other squads of tanks, jets, bombers and helicopters.
It’s a bit clunky, limited as an RTS and odd as an FPS, but I loved it.
I never managed to play it against anyone online when I finally got my hands on a copy
I want to be Admiral Ackbar shouting "GREEN GROUP, STICK CLOSE TO HOMING SECTOR MV-7" and for that to actually result in RTS units moving on a map. I want to be Captain Picard shouting "ALL POWER TO FORWARD SHIELDS" and for that to actually result in a change in resource allocation of the 'power' resource.
I took a crack at it about a decade ago. It's hard. Was able to get 2 stable layers for hours (maybe a "season" in game time), but over a long enough period the population always became fairly homogenous.
If I spent all the time learning guitar hero songs that I spent on a real guitar, that would be awesome
It was a location based strategy game I built (with lots of help) but failed to take off. Building games like this is super expensive.
If we built it again today it'd probably be on a "layer 2" chain (Ethereum) and the parcels would probably be NFTs.
I thought Deus Ex Human Revolution got some parts right though.
Human Revolution did a lot of great things, and Mankind Divided improved even more with exception of the abrupt end.
But there's something about the original that is hard to point, that make it unique and hard to replicate. It's probably not a single thing, how all things work so well together.
I want a very slow, casual game that takes days — running a train in the mid-1800's U.S.
Mostly I want to, from time to time, look over and see the scenery I am passing through, once in a while adjust the speed, stop and take on coal and water. Most of the time I want to ignore it and be doing other things.
SlowTV + Casual Gaming
Also, more games where the NPCs don't just stand around like statues. I like playing games that are immersive, and that more than anything really just kills the vibe for me.
But that'd basically require an AGI to handle conversations and content, along with a BCI for interactions. So, unlikely to ever exist.
Keep: - Dark atmosphere - Offline or online - Solo or party-based - Classes, skills/weapons based on classes - Rare/unique loot - Mags - Sound/Music design - Multiple areas - Progressive difficulty / replayability
Remake: - Combat - to modernize the combat, it could resemble something like Dark Souls.
I’ve never found a game that replicates the feeling of FS2 but that could be because I’m old now and most of my childhood joy is dead. Excellent game mechanics, short missions, gradually upgrading ships and weapons and the feeling of a vast universe to discover.
A similar one would be ME2 and ME3 but those final missions had the same structure as any other mission. Once you kill off the enemies your fine, no sense of tension.
Nowadays if you're looking for that sort of tension it's more likely built into gameplay mechanics like dark souls. But any tension you feel there is incidental rather then guided by a fixed single player campaign... and once you master the mechanics the tension inevitably lessens.
One is focused on strategic and the narration, and the other has better in-person tactic battle.
Both of them are serious time-consumer, and I experience most flow states with these two games. Combining them organically would result a huge time-consumer that can be played all year without getting bored.
(There are mods that bolt them together but feels not seamless and coherent)
A MMORTS play as a general mode combined with Call of Duty + Team Fortress first person play w/ objectives, capture points, sniping, vehicles etc...
Game that makes you feel like you are one wrong step from detection and disaster like Invisible inc did.
I want to play a game where all the NPCs are AI trained with Seq2Seq neural networks. I have been trying to write the game off and on for a while, but it's not easy to write. There are some things that come pretty close, but are not quite there.
I know there's http://www.freeinfantry.com/, but for whatever reason, I haven't gotten into it.
I would love to "pilot" a golden eagle on the steppes as it hunts sheep on a cliffside. Or an owl using its incredibly acute hearing to locate mice in the dead of night. Or a swift flitting around the top of a river collecting bugs rising from the water. Or a peregrine falcon diving at 150mph onto a flock of unsuspecting ducks.
...and maybe a possibility to host your own server for it, to play only with your friends/people you choose.
Pretty much an immersive sim similar to the "One City Block Action RPG" described by Warren Spector But with a big emphasis on the stealth aspect, and fighting mechanics like Sleeping Dogs (environment interaction)
Where you approach the game, an hostage situation for exemple, how you wish
You're a fellow with a gun or two and there's not much else to know: there's no upgrade ladder, no downloadable content, nothing else to pay for... just go through the story, shoot things and hide behind things, and be on your way.
More classic Halo-like games please.
Maybe also throw in the ability to depose other members of the team (with various risks of trying to do so), so you never know who you can trust.
The backstabbing aspect would be difficult, with lobbies limited to 8 individuals, there would be a max of 4x paired "players" (e.g. pair1 & pair2 vs pair3 & pair4). If teams aren't locked like in FFA diplo matches it turns into a 3v1 (pair1, pair2, & pair3 vs pair4).
Unless the game could be modded to support lobbies > 12 or 16, the diplo aspect would be limited.
Basically Die Hard X Splinter Cell Set in one highly simulated skyscraper where you approach the game how you wish with fighting mechanics like Sleeping Dogs (environment interaction) and immersive sim possibilities
Make me design an assembler for assembling my own robot arms, then strap them to a cart (that I assembled in a different factory), put an AI into it, and use it as a logistics robot for building more things...
There have been other takes on this concept too, but Natural Selection is probably the closest to your description. BattleZone (1998) was also a hybrid of RTS and FPS but the units were mostly computer controlled.
All this happens while music is playing.
From the perspective of those watching, it looks like the player is dancing extremely well to the music.
https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/lba-new-name-twinsen/
I'm currently making a game, in my free time, about what might be the most important topics facing humanity at present. (so... no pressure! lol)
This time without that NGE BS and no playable Jedi.
Yeah...I'm aware of the emu but it didn't age well for my eyes...
I love MMOs but I hate grinding in spam clicking the key aid for abilities. I want an mmo that lets my mind go numb from work like call of duty without the toxicity.
Kingdom Come - 2
A return to old school party RPG games.
Something that isn't a FPS, an anime "go retrieve the turnip from Farmer Tim" game or a guy with an axe jumping around with flashing things like a console game, killing thousands of monsters.
The game procedurally generates a universe which you can explore. You can also make copies of yourself (ship) and can interact with other "Bobs" in each star system. Each clone of yourself is a true AI in the game with its own personality and decision tree.
I cut my teeth writing mods in quake-c for jedi outcast (jk2) and jedi academy (jk3). I was never hugely into starwars but playing what is essentially quake 2/3 with force powers on the quake engine was always an excellent game. I wish raven and lucasfilm had continued with the series.
Same original graphics.
Defender Robotron
As in you could clock in/do a job in this 3D environment. I realize probably not efficient but it would be for say bed ridden/disabled people that can use their brain but not their body.
Similarly, you wouldn't know which technology would work in this world and which not. Maybe alchemy would be real, and you could develop it to mass produce rare materials. Maybe it would turn out to be fake science only. Similarly, magic and religion may work as either basic mind tricks and psychology that enlightenment would mostly cancel out, or be part of the reality of the world, and you could get gods fighting on your side Greek mythology style, or wizards casting spells even deadlier than tanks and nukes.
I guess this system would be already a bit too hard to implement, but if I could keep wishing freely, it would be awesome if you could actually govern by writing whatever law you want. So you wouldn't just click a button to switch from feudalism to theocracy or communism, but you would actually have to come to an agreement with power figures (or classes) in your society on how your state would work. You could grant rights to tax trade routes in exchange of doing military service for example. And later you would need support from some other group if you would like to abolish this system.
Basically make it easy for you to control a unit a first person perspective with all the correct controls. If that unit dies you are take back to RTS Mode.
My managers usually do cringe worthy "get to know your colleagues" events.
If there could be a game where me and my teammates could collaborate, work towards a goal (that is not programming), while also talking, I think that could be fun.
Exploring Io, finding ancient aliens technologies and merging mind with machine by taking drugs. That'd be amazing.
The same thing, but in the setting of The Expanse books and TV series.
Specifically, ones that has electric wires, water pipes, air ducts, control cables.
If you want a missile launcher you gotta have conveyors moving the missiles from storage to launchers.
Something like Oxygen Not included, but in 3d and building spaceships.
... among the million other things it was supposed to have.
I see some other comments echoing this idea, such as "Star Control II, but more so.".
https://mobile.twitter.com/caldy/status/877661229254180865?l...
- the open world and exploration of Xenoblade Chronicles
- the long-term play and grinding of The Last Story or Diablo 3
- the wonderful motion-control of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (the Wii version please --- archery on the Switch just isn't the same)
I should be able to switch to every other alive unit on the field.
I just love that game and nothing really replaced it, to my knowledge.
Then, Thud, the game loosely described by Sir Terry Pratchett in Thud!
Tribes][, only it still exists.
Android: Netrunner, digitally, but with a user interface that's as good as Hearthstone, and also playable on mobile.
A platform that allows anyone to create content for a rpg-action game
Edit: looks too small scale, but in the right direction. I want the focus to be on the over world a la total war.
This game looked like a lot of fun. It’s a bummer that it got canceled.
(sorry - rules stipulate I have to share.)
I loved that game as a kid.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1351080/Pharaoh_A_New_Era...
Also, it sounds cool, but I don't think it'd be fun, just a neat curiosity.
Everything are axis-aligned boxes in my idea, so the math is easy for rotating the view. (But to rotate in 5D, you fix on 3 axes, not 1.)
With one spacial dimension x, and one time dimension t, you can roughly describe motion like this:
def move(speed, delta):
x += speed*delta
With 2D time, I imagine it as red-time and blue-time. It might look like this:
def move(speed_red, speed_blue, delta_red, delta_blue):
x += speed_red * delta_red + speed_blue * delta_blue
A mechanic of this game involves switching between red-time and blue-time at will. Most elements would only move in red time or blue time. But some elements might move in a mixture of both.
You can have arbitrary time dimensions, but I think two are plenty for this game. You can get real interesting with this mechanic. Velocity is preserved within a time-dimension, so you can "save" your momentum for later. You can have gravity with different strengths and directions for each time dimension.
There's a lot of reasons this won't work for a realistic simulation. I had spent some time thinking of a fan-sequel to Outer Wilds which utilizes two time dimensions, but I don't think I can write a physics simulation where that would make sense. But for a lil platformer it can be fun
A VR dnd first person rpg. Wizards have to actually chant and draw symbols in air to cast spells. I still remember the scene in which Raistlin fights against Fistandantilus and would love to play in a game.
No install. Only web technology. Easy multi-player Possibility to do Massive Multiplayer (100s) or just 2 or 3 Either blitz game (couple of hours max) or persistent
(Hint, have done it)
I will never pay $60 for a game and don't own any consoles or a powerful GPU but I'd like to see it done.
I want a 4x game where you play from the side of the unrest / rebellions.
Right now looks like it's only HoMM 3 that is a TBS with cyber sport dimension.
Supreme Commander gets close to this, but I want the full surface area of a planet as the campaign.
But the idea I was thinking on was closer to, when Command and Conquer has you advancing across Europe...I want the map to just keep scrolling at that scale. Let me finish a mission by building an MCV and having it just drive way off the map.
Think at least diablo Like world generation would be nice. Nôt sure how to generated True unique enemies.
stardew valley meets fallout.
Subnatica in space. Inspired by an episode of love death plus robots.
(Seriously, DQB2 is a kids game but it does a whole bunch of things really well, it’s just too lightweight.)
A first-person shooter played by sound alone. Screen is black. Clicks go out and you locate targets based on echoes.
No bothersome worldbuilding, characters, lore, narratives and tie in into other frenchises.
Just puzzles and mindgames with malicious AI in unknown testing facility.
2. The game TIS-100 was supposed to be a minigame in.
the orignal linux binaries crash on current linux distributions :(
You are the head of a global climate change task force and are tasked with fighting climate change with diplomacy and technology.
What an amazing universe they created for the original one. It was ahead of its time and is criminally underappreciated today.
Just decided the world will be voxel.
The gameplay should be very punishing! PvP everywhere.
It's a genre I wish I could experience with modern game design polish.
I think browser based games have some interesting potential.
One Game which has it all - re-creating Dante's Inferno.
=====
Types of game mechanics:
Overview - Cut scene
First Circle (Limbo) - 2D black and white like the game limbo
Second Circle (Lust) - Isometric like monument valley
Third Circle (Gluttony) - Mobile AR game to collect resources like pokemon go
Fourth Circle (Greed) - resource management/strategy like factorio
Fifth Circle (Wrath) - 2D pixel art like Duke Nukem
Sixth Circle (Heresy) - classic text adventure
Seventh Circle (Violence) - Glory Kill 3D system like DOOM
Eighth Circle (Fraud) - another mobile game with puzzles
Ninth Circle (Treachery) - VR
=====
Easter Eggs:
- The text adventure level (Sixth Circle) should have an easter egg which helps you freely move to any circle (a hidden response option)
=====
Storyline/Premise for the Rounds:
First Circle (Limbo) - our protagonist wakes up in a world where life is monotonous and structured (think start of Walter Mitty)
Second Circle (Lust) - evening party in club, has to socialize, meets a girl/guy he likes, they end up the night together
Third Circle (Gluttony) - morning has to find ingredients around the house for a full breakfast around the house to have a breakfast. She leaves but with cryptic messages to find her later in the game.
Fourth Circle (Greed) - goes to office and needs to manage his team/business i.e. product launch or bidding on a complex contract or moving supply chain around the world kind of optimization problems to improve top line or bottom line. (think strategy gamnes)
Fifth Circle (Wrath) - does something wrong, now has to run away from various bosses and colleagues who send monsters/killer robots after him (think Matrix)
Sixth Circle (Heresy) - someone starts texting him, as God, suddenly on an app he didn't know he have. Red pill or blue pill. obv takes the blue pill and turns out it was the same guy/girl from Lust/Gluttony stage and now they want him to fight for the survival of the civilization (Maybe a third pill for the Easter egg?)
Seventh Circle (Violence) - he is given weapons to fight back through an army who is ready to destroy civilization! Finally he ends up being killed.
Eighth Circle (Fraud) - wakes up on a multi generational ship which arrives a new solar system. turns out everything so far was simulated dreams in a cryo chamber to bring humanity to a new viable solar system.
Ninth Circle (Treachery) - but now he finds out that the solar systems has an alien race like Borg who are evil and he & everyone on the ship must fight once and for all to win his and everyone's freedom!
I know there were a few mods that added online servers to older ROMs. But I would love to see a fully fledged GameFreak version.
That game would destroy my personal and professional life and I'd love every second of it.
Basketball + Soccer + Rugby + parkour + that Mesoamerican sport
All tiebreakers are settled by team brawls
The losers are sacrificed to the winners deity (optional)
Basically, a single player leaderboard racing game where your skill alone determines how well you do and you don't have to deal with the worst part of most racing games - other cars on the track
Basically, the same UI centric text based adventure FPS horror RPG but with freshened visuals.
Basically, Pokemon Snap but for history.
It's SUCH a good game as it is. I think it could only improve with the addition of creative PvP modes.
I dislike the "you need to shoot a full magazine of bullets to kill an enemy player" of the recent years. Give me back the days where movement skills and mouse aim would be an advantage when playing online.
An update/remake of the incredible machine.
Take photos, alter them and try to obtain as much clout as you can for sponsorships.
Seriously. I still play ETQW, 15 years after release, so...yeah.
1. You run a food truck where you serve hotcakes. It's a rhythm game though, with elements of animal/pet care.
2. You manage an empire but are allowed to pick any given time and place during which to build your empire. You are given a varying batch of starting resources that should allow the empire to get off the ground. Like superpowers, maybe you have amazing charisma or the ability to fly. The type of empire is also mutable. So you could build a media empire starting in early 1900s Berlin and watch it eclipse the entire idea of WWII within a decade. Or you could start a hot dog cart in Siberia and end up with Putin as your temporarily ally as you sweep through northern China within 20 years.
3. You are in charge of demolishing old infrastructure that is getting in the way. You learn the ins and outs of this kind of work as you play. For example there may be incentives for looking after wildlife that are living around the structures. But it may also cost you; however the game rewards creativity in this area. (Business game though doesn't sound right for what I had in mind. Maybe more of someone who's on the gov't side of managing the contractors and their work...)
Bringing it back to your comment, I can across [1], which brings some popular boardgames online. Premium games follow your license model (non-paying players can play with paid members)
Or, a remake of Tie Fighter.
* ball
* referee
* goal-keeper (FPS)
* commentator
with graphics of modern Fifa games.
Geography shapes nation borders and supply plays a decisive part of winning wars.
in a Civ game, a battle unit siting in the wild for hundreds of years is just absurd.
edit: typo
- Megaman Battle Network 7
Loved this game as a teenager.
The origin story would be that humans build AGI within the next 100 years. That AGI then builds an FTL drive, and it keeps going from there.
Initial missions to different parts of the solar system take place, and that just keeps expanding to the far reaches of space for thousands or millions of game years.
I’d like for the game to just expand until the end of the universe, allowing humans to evolve for millions of years, discovering everything from new life to multiple dimensions, and even discovering pocket universes.
This would sort of be in the vein of Three Body Problem Death’s End. In the open world style of GTA.
I've been around long enough to have played both Doom and Duke Nukem over a phone/modem. I remember with Duke Nukem especially, the ability to place laser tripmines plus chat made for a really thrilling experience, it was as much as about trying to decieve the other person into going the wrong way as it was having good aim.
I feel like Among Us, et al, of course has this trickery part, but I don't think I've seen the two combined. Kind of reminds me of Spy v. Spy from the olden days of Mad?
I want RTS to make a comeback. Sick of mobas.
Dune
Fortress America
Supremacy
etc
- Nobody
As game progresses climate get worse and you are forced to retreat to greater depths with your factories and you need to research technologies that enable that in time.
INTRO: you crashland in a small capsule, much like in Subanutica. You have a multitool with a pocket dimension for inventory but it doesn't let you deconstruct the capsule. So you scout around in shallow waters not being able to do much because multitool is not suitable for biomatter. You find a cave with a pocket of air. Then the first hail comes. Initially it's not that bad but gets larger so it starts dealing damage to you. It could kill you if you didn't retreat into the cave you found underwater. It ends quickly but as you emerge you find out that your capsule was broken into pieces. This time your multitool has no trouble of recovering scrap materials and placing them in the pocket dimension along with a fission battery that miraculously survived. You are building enclosed space under water larger than your capsule but with thinner walls. It's still full of water but you build your first water electrolizer powered for now with recovered fission battery. Oxygen is used for pumping out water to provide space for machines you can build inside. With the structure full of oxygen your suit can create breathable atmosphere inside of itself. Fire would be disastrous, but you are hoping at some point you'll be able to find ways to produce inert gasses to make interior safer. Hydrogen is stored to provide your constructions with neutral bouyancy. You fashion out a knife out of scrap and go out to look for something to eat. You submerge your first building a bit deeper but only as deep as thin walls allow. You are starting to wonder how will you get power when fission battery runs out. You scan your environment with the use of the multitool and when you find useful materials AI of your multitool unpacks new construction plans and production recipes that let you build more and explore further.
Tens or hundreds of hours later you float quite deep admiring your sprawling web of minifactories connected by flexible conduits carrying various material and parts at dazzling speed. Most of the connections go even deeper to rare mineral mines but some go up to get some ice from massive hail that periodically strikes to be utilized for cooling (when summer arives) and for extraction of substances only available in the atmosphere of the planet that get captured in the hail as it forms there. Apart from wildlife there are small drones around that swim in swarms and maintain your structures and upgrade them when it's time submerge them deeper. You wonder, what this planet throws at you next and how bad will it affect your operations and plans.
or any other european city
Because Darwinism rules!
;)
Fallout 1 & 2 & Tactics needs a re-make. Mutant Year Zero, was pretty good. I hate that they took Fallout into the FPS genera.
MOO has some re-makes. None of which were very good, in my opinion.
Escape Velocity has Endless Sky and a few others, always Eve Online if you're feeling like you need to go down that rabbit hole.
Civ has so many re-makes... it's gotten too complicated, they need a "simple mode" again to keep my interest, I don't have time for 40-hour long multi-player games.
WoW is back. But... the community is distilled toxicity at this point. Just... never a more fitting phrase, "You think you do, but you don't." Try interacting with anyone in that game for 30 seconds and you'll think you got lost in the depths of 4-Chan.
I fired up an emulator and played Phantasy Star and Dragon Warrior (at like 6x speed) and those were fun. I'm sure there are more advanced re-makes.
Secret of Mana is still fun.
Zelda... so many remakes, most are good. A Link to the Past for SNES still holds a place in my heart. The new FPS versions are less interesting for me.
Diablo... new version coming out. I'd love it to be... just a tad less grindy. I know that's the whole premise, but it got to the point where you were just trying to zug a map as quick as you could to get gear that you're just going to shard... and for that 1 in 1,000 chance for the upgrade you want. I'd love it if the upgrades had a bit more predictability to it. Fine to have them be random still, but you need a better way to grind up the "perfect" stats so it's less of a slot machine.
I don't know, like what else should be made? Might and Magic was pretty fun. And Darkest Dungeon was great.
Plants vs. Zombies I think is still around?
Man, there's no shortage of good games... I really miss the thrill of coming home from school to play video games. Games are all so much more now... but that thrill of staying up until 2 AM playing, trying to stay hidden so my mom wouldn't yell at me, trying to be the first kid in school to beat the game... like... the games aren't as fun as they used to be. Ha.
Especially online games. Holy hell. Just trying to play any game against teens who have unlimited free-time... and their hate-spewing potty mouths... it's not fun. I avoid most multi-player games as a result of how bad the communities are... especially towards new players.
1. Time travel small openworld stealth game:
Imagine a small town were you start out and suddenly you can travel in time like 30 years ( ;) ) and all of your actions have real impact. You travel back, plant a tree, you travel back to the present and its here.
There might be a big diamond coming to your small town as an exhibition and you want to steal it. You can steal it by building a tunnel in the past or other things like starting to work there and copy a key. Or you could become the towns key maker and wait until the museum wants you to copy the key. Or you could become the towns security system expert and actually sell it them.
Problems: When you can travel in time, you are rich anyway. I haven't thought about it for a while what further implications it have but i do remember an nvidia demo were you saw a car age (like it becomes super rusty while watching the video).
The complexity comes from all the implications you need to take care of. therefore a small town.
2. A story line clicker game (spoiler alert! ;)):
Style: 2d pixel iso. You want to become rich and in this world clicking the mouse is how you earn your 'clicks'. You start out small in your kids room. Sitting there clicking (player has to do it manually). After a while you are allowed to move to your parents garage, you get a desk, you can now click faster. Than you hire some friends.
The transition is basically: your kids room, garage, small office, big office. When you start owning an office, your character sits in front / at the top and looks down to office talbes and the clickers.
Over time you can expand, you can order overtime, you need to hire new staff. If you burn them out you have to hire activly more and faster.
As a side quest you could persue a romantic relationship.
The game is over when your character dies. Your character dies of an heart attack in the rage of 60-90 years depending on what side quests you do and then when you had your heart attack, a high score is calculated additionally to all of clisk you got.
The twist: you can also persue a romantic relationship and if you do that and you spend time with your partner (like in mini events) you earn way less clicks but 1. you hit a higher age like 80-100 and 2. surprise: your highscore gets an additional happines multiplyier which will always be higher than your highscore without a partner in life. This also unlocks a hidden achievement and the happines mode / display and only after you went this route the happines factor is shown in the highscore calculation.
Basically the game should motivate you to be super aggressive first: Lots of overtime, killing your employees and using drugs and rehiring constantly for the persuede for the highest score and after your second playthrough and achieving a specific highscore you get hints that it might be better to be happy.
Here're interesting things that I'd love to explore given the chance and skills.
1. This game is MMORPG. Think World of Warcraft game.
2. Everything is realistic (more or less).
3. There's no fixed story.
4. World is generated initially but then shaped by NPCs and PCs.
5. Every NPC is controlled by AI. Every creature controlled by AI. Not stupid AI but real AI. Some creatures fight each other. Like wolves sometimes go hunt rabbits, rabbits don't want to die so they learn to hide, wolves learn to find rabbits. Wolves learn that humans are strong so they coordinate with other wolves to kill humans, etc. Some wolves are stupid, some are smart, some have scars from rabbits. Wolf parents teach their pups to hunt. They probably have some initially trained AI, but then everything is trained inside the game.
6. Human NPCs learn their complex lifes, interact with other humans, mine, grow, fight, kill, conquer.
So far it sounds like dwarf fortress, but I want to underline that behaviours are not mechanical, but rather more real-world where creatures are learning from their mistakes.
7. Human NPCs provide quests to PCs which actually generated from their stories. Like some tribe stolen women from other tribe, now their chief asks travelers to return women.
8. Everything is free for all, you can kill anything or help anyone.
Basically it's fantasy world with extreme freedom and extremely advanced NPC AI.
Also it's MMO and I'd love it to be as "realistic" as possible (in some weird sense of reality, of course). Things are mundane. You need money, you need to find ways to earn it. Distances are tremendous, like in real life, you need to walk for hours to reach another village or for days to reach another city. Mounts are not magic, you need to care about them, feed them, you can spoil them and they'll die (and they cost huge amount of money). Wolves can eat your horse. Wizards can portal people but that requires extreme dedication, costly reagents, so only very rich people can afford that. No flying gryphons, sorry. You can't just resurrect after death, probably you need to create new character and start from the scratch. There could be resurrection spell, but again it must be performed by other players, probably by several skilled priests with very costly reagents and only for a limited time after death, if corpse is not damaged severely. Scars and traumas affect character and could be healed, again, by extremely skilled doctors and costly reagents.
Interaction with NPCs is done using either speech or written dialogs, not just by selecting things in the list. Like they talk to you and you talk to them. NPCs can lie to you, of course, take advantage of you, etc.
all the way
There are so many cool 3D tactics available, similar to the 2D Into the Breach, eg a space station can defend a whole region of space with beam weapons, but you can launch an asteroid at it that makes it vulnerable for a short window, detonate a precious gravity weapon, or sacrifice ships to get a railgun ship close. A railgun ship can kill a capital ship, but only if you can close enough to fire. Capital ships beat all small ships, but are slow. For example, charging 10 carriers down into a planetary gravity well to take out an orbiting space station, sacrificing them all to bring one dedicated railgun ship close enough for a killshot.
I can see a huge payoff for learning basic orbital mechanics and ambush tactics to overcome a superior force, eg commit ships to an attack by accelerating them on a path that may take several minutes to play out, and manoeuvre in a ‘bullet hell’ of slow-moving missiles. Homeworld was too focused on ‘just click it with ships’. I want to pick the right ships for the job, a la Witcher potions. Then I need to use them strategically, eg attacking front-on means I’ll face a powerful front shield and lose, but if I setup a pincer movement from two directions I can target their rear weak shield and win.
Envision a mission to say, commit genocide by glassing every planet in a solar system with asteroid strikes. You can pick one planet to take out with a surprise asteroid attack, but defensive orbital space stations then protect the remaining planets, so you need to bring your fleet into the system. Deep in the system are slow-moving capital ships that will kill any small ship they catch.
General ideas below: - Capital ships cannot accelerate quickly, leading to hit and run tactics where you fight where their capital ships are not. If your capital ship dies, you die, but you can use it to turn the tide of battle. - Stealth ships and ‘glass cannon’ ships, eg an unshielded missile ship that can kill everything but dies in one hit. Do you commit ships on an approach course to that high value carrier, or is it protected by an invisible fleet of stealth ships? - Most weapons take time to take act and everything has a multiple ’hard counters’, eg a gravity weapon that destroys a large area but needs the firing ship to be protected, stationary, for 30 seconds to trigger. ECM ships expose stealth ships but have no weaponry and stop working under missile fire. - Tradeoffs between shield/armour vs engine and weaponry, eg some ships can only shield one side, so a ship is safe against a single target but will die against multiple targets. Shields are limited and some can’t be used while the main engine is running, but kinetic weapons can one-shot your ship once shields are down. A railgun ship is a sitting duck for 10 seconds before it can fire. - WW1 biplane and naval battles eg get up close behind an enemy ship and shred it’s shield weak spot, missile ships that work best up close but are useless at a distance, countermeasure ships. - Billiard ball ship momentum, eg fast ships can fly in quickly for a safe flyby but then need to turn around and decelerate, while slow ships become easy targets once capital ships deplete their shields. You have to send your slow ships first, then launch the fast ones to overshoot them. - Missions with fast scouts or asteroids as weapons by accelerating them to 90% of light speed beforehand, aiming them like billiard balls with planetary flybys, but you need to base your entire strategy around them. Eg a shoot asteroids at a deep space station. They’ll arrive in 5 minutes, but the space station will see the attack a minute out and shut down shields in order to move out of the way. Do you accelerate your fleet to 10% lightspeed to get there quickly, knowing that each ship will have time for only one shot? Or do you go in slowly, hoping you can kill it before the arrival of two capital ships coming out of the gravity well? - Orbital choices matter, gravity wells are slow to escape, so fast ships can only change orbit slowly or through planetary slingshots. You can match speed with an enemy fleet, but you can also send ships from the other direction at high speed to discover stealth ships or snipe their capitals. Ships are often weak in one direction, so you have to pincer them before they can surround you. - So many great scifi plots to draw on, especially around forbidden weapons, AI and an Ian Banks-style technological race against far-superior aliens.
It’s obviously a fiction summarizing all the knowledge and education we have freely available now online and to some extent social media, and an iPad might be pretty damn close if you get all the right things on it. But still, childrens games these days are all focused on optimizing for intense attention on mindless content and accidental clicks to purchase other games that do the same, or pressuring kids to pressure their parents to buy skins. I would love to have a “gaming” experience that instead focused on giving kids the opportunity to learn and use their knowledge in an immersive universe, and to support them in their development.
The planet Cronus contains the most valuable and energy dense fuel humanity has ever discovered, Serum. The controlling federation has prohibited unauthorized mining. With the recent discovery of inter-dimensional travel those restrictions have become impossible to enforce. Individuals and factions have begun jumping between universes to simultaneously reap what remains of Cronus.
You are a reaper of Cronus. You command a ship along with a regenerative droid that you control from orbit. The droid is deployed from your ship onto Cronus. The mission is to extract as much Serum from the species of Cronus.
You are not alone. Others have again started reaping Cronus. Although split across multiple universes, chances are you will come in contact with another reaper. Be wary, the Serum you collect can be extracted from your droid. Trust noone.
The technology that powers your droid is also fueled by Serum. To prolong your harvest make sure to keep enough Serum in reserves to power your droid. If your droid dies or runs out of Serum a new one will be created and dropped back onto Cronus.
I love Paradox games, but none of my friends are willing to play a game that involves staring at maps and reports for hours on end.
That or something like the old Mount and Blade: With Fire and sword conversion.
I love musket warfare games, but they either feel too realistic and immersive (War of Rights) or too much like multiplayer FPS (Holdfast).
With Fire and Sword though has mount an blade tactical mechanics, but is also arcade-y and fun to play without devolving into multiplayer nonsense. Update that with a modern engine and FPS mechanics and it could be great.
Fortnite sort of started like this, but the single player mode was a microtransaction abomination that was more akin to a excel spreadsheet than a game.
The beta of battle-royale Fortnite had a lot of this organically at the end of the match -- teams would each build towers and attack each other. Was a blast, but quickly was micro-optimized into kids using their reaction time to instabuild crap and shoot each other while making windows. Really awful gameplay.
I remember it was challenging to install because I tried to install with the 3 disks and it still didn't work after. However I found a torrent of a "portable" version that worked out of the box!
A procedural universe where each world has the density of detail as GTA 5 or Elden Ring or SOTC and the same amount of variability as well.
This could be achievable in the future by throwing some ML into these procedural algorithms. We already sort of do it with text.
Let's say, humans found a way to live without eating and drinking, now how life is going to look like after a some time?
It is basically a more sophisticated and realist version of the game of life.
Except with the ability for the community to develop new content.
And the community at large to vote on what new content goes into the game.
Let the players build the world and balance the classes.
I want to see if an AI can break me.