A magical school sim/manager. Imagine how cool it would be to build your own Hogwarts with moving staircases and hidden rooms and passageway, and watch the world of magic come alive as students go about their daily school life.
That, or an actually good AAA Barbie game.
100% science based dragon MMO
Awww, I always kind of felt bad for that person. Hilarious though.
I actually thought of a ridiculous concept for an mmo, not so much an mmo, but a response to my frustrations with World of Warcraft, and how the most play race was human and the most played class was warrior. You know the one combination that you can actually be in real life, human Warrior.
It gave me an amusing thought, then if I ever ran a fantasy-based mmo, there would be absolutely no human option, and no realistic class options, like you wouldn’t be able to pick a class that you could definitely do in real life.
And the first major expansion would introduce the scientist class, and be all about humans finding this fantasy world. And just make that the main selling point you could play as boring Mundane Human doing real world stuff. Just a little social experiment to see how people would react… The humans would definitely have a mad scientist vibe, so it wouldn’t be completely boring.
Dragonriders of Pern - the game.
That already has a game though
If you can even call that old pukestain a game. Definitely not one that anyone would love to play.
NOTE: Someone probably has developed it, but I’m too poor to buy a decent computer.
I’ve been wanting the shittiest, most grindy military logistics game possible for a bit now. Like, “oh you didn’t upgrade your Sock factory? Fuck you now your platoon has trench foot” type Grindy.
I want to feel pain
Rimworld is probably the closest thing to that right now. Watch your village starve as their clothes wear out and they get frostbite.
Or dwarf fortress if you want to get medieval
Funny thing, I’m actually playing rimworld right now!
An urbanism focussed city builder where you start with an existing city in the current car-centric style, possibly including a couple of dozen kilometers around the city so rural problems are included as well and have to transform it, with realistic building project times, into one that is more walkable, has safe bike paths, good public transport,…
In particular I would also like it to take verticality in to account both for transport (people and bikes and trains have a harder time going up and down than cars, boats need locks,…) and for buildings (stores at the bottom of a building, residential above,…) and that accounts for the huge amounts of space car-centric cities waste on parking as well as the ongoing infrastructure costs for maintenance and replacements of all that infrastructure in sprawling cities.
Basically “Not Just Bikes” the game.
A spaceship captain game with an AI crew that follows your orders, and is focused on problem solving and exploration rather than combat and resource gathering. Kind of like ongoing episodes of star trek, but in game form.
A Rockstar Open World Pirate game.
Black Flag was getting there, it had good vibes, but unfortunately they had to make it an Assassins Creed game and Ubisoft doesn’t know how to do it right anyways. Rockstar does.
Factorio-like game where you focus on sustainability rather than being the bad guy in an alien landscape. Need wood? Better replant or there won’t be anything for higher levels of the game. Need metal? You can get it, but only in a few places and then you need to think about recycling what you have.
I have a horror game concept, based around the old days, back when used game stores actually were a good deal instead of just a price gouging den of collectors. Back when buying a copy of a game pre-owned meant that you got the save files of the old user with it.
So this is a harvest moon type, there is already a file here, the game yells at you if you try to delete it, you get characters telling you that you can’t hide from what you have done. And when you play the game everyone is pissed at you, the world is in ruins, and making any real progress is next to impossible due to the horrible state the world’s in and no one wanting to help you.
The object of the game would be to convince the people of the game world that you are not the original user, and that you want to set things right. And the new game plus would just be what the game is supposed to be like under normal conditions.
Admittedly I got the idea from hearing about a Harvest Moon friends of Mineral Town Creepypasta called The Goddess Has Not Forgiven You, which I can’t actually find. But it was described by a harvest moon iceberg video. When I couldn’t find the story that it was talking about, this was just kind of the idea I had for an indie game based off of it.
If you are an indie game designer who wants to do this, feel free to steal my idea, Just credit me for it and shoot me a copy of it if you can get a hold of me.
I want a game that is a standard sci fi/fantasy RPG, except the main characters each suffer from a mental health condition that affects their gameplay (and of course the story).
My brother (now deceased) had both schizophrenia and numerous personalities. He had visual and auditory hallucinations thanks to the schizophrenia. On top of that, in my last conversation with him, he mentioned that all his personalities ‘shared information’ except for one that was in denial. Because of that, when a different personality took over after that one, he would have no idea what happened during the time that denial personality was in control. Sadly, my brother passed after he had stopped taking medications for a week and decided to use computer duster (something he had finally got clean of) to sleep and never woke up.
Now, imagine that in a high sci fi or fantasy RPG. You might begin fighting and wasting energy on enemies who aren’t actually there, but you think they are. You can go into battle and no other party members will help because, as you find out after, those enemies weren’t really there. Maybe you become weak because of a would and have to get through a dangerous area to get to a hospital. There you find you never had an injury, it was a hallucination (based on a 911 call my brother made thinking he had slit his throat when he had not). Maybe you go to learn some key information from a character who then dies dies suddenly. However, you don’t remember any of it.
Most important though, in the end, you are still the hero and still save the day. The idea being that yes people with these mental health challenges struggle, but they aren’t monsters. My brother was one of the kindest people I know and loved to help people. A game like that, if done right, could help players understand what these conditions are actually like (not hollywoods bs) and show that they can still be heroes. I think that would be cool
A driving (either racing or GTA-style) game that generates the roads from real-world geospatial data/street view imagery similar to how Microsoft Flight Simulator does.
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If you have a VR headset then you don’t have to wait! https://store.steampowered.com/app/763790/TrainerVR/
Unrelated, but if you do have a VR headset (Or get one) make sure to check out Walkabout Mini Golf!
Mirror’s Edge-style gameplay (specifically first person) for experiencing Spider-man’s first few weeks of having powers, including the time prior to having built the web-shooters. I have wanted this ever since the teaser trailer for the first Andrew Garfield movie.
Social Anxiety Survival Horror. You’re a guy at a friend’s party trying to avoid conversations while putting in an appearance with your friend so they know you were here. You can deflect conversations with small talk you pick up by eavesdropping, but it won’t work on drunk people, so you also need to run and hide. Your ex-partner eventually shows up and is hunting you down to have a frank conversation about your relationship, which is instant game over.
I would love to buy this game on sale and never get around to playing it.
You’ve just proposed the next indie game of the year
Good. Someone, please make this. And make it first person for the full effect.
Other ideas for people to pinch:
- You can only use each snippet of small talk once before collecting it again, because you’re afraid of repeating yourself.
- The game is filled with collectibles, but they’re all located on the floor, so you’re more likely to find them if you’re in character and looking at the floor the entire time.
- To pause the game, you have to look at your phone while standing in a quiet area.
- Your ex-partner has a lengthy list of grievances you can hear when they’re hunting you. This includes “you always run away from me at parties”.
I probably wouldn’t want this game to actually exist, but it’s been stuck in my head for years so here goes. I described this one a while ago. A friend of mine was on mushrooms once and described a first person WW1 game where you’re an Austro-Hungarian courier running across battlefields. There would be parkour, time management, stealth, stuff like that. Sneaking through trenches and whatever. At first the missions go ok, easy enough. But then you’re given more complex missions that waste your time, or are foolishly planned.
Your character begins mumbling under their breath about how the generals are doing everything wrong, the war is lost. Your character becomes more deranged as the missions become more fruitless. Eventually your guy will start screaming deranged conspiracies and wild racist shit. There would be a mechanic where you start to need amphetamines to function.
Then in the last mission you catch sight of your reflection in a puddle and you’ve been playing as Hitler this whole time.
I think of so many games where the whole point is just a 2-3 second bit at the end like this.