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 can checkout https://store.steampowered.com/app/1392820/Milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk_inside_a_bag_of_milk/ - it’s not that but it’s a somewhat similar thing
I had a very similar idea but it’s about avoiding contact and conversation out on the street and on public transportation. May or may not be influenced by real life experience.
I haven’t played it - and the “social anxiety as horror”-slant feels more metaphorical than literal in its marketing - but this makes me think of the game “Homebody” a bit
Easy mode: party host has a dog or cat that will let you sit and pet it all night.
100% science based dragon MMO
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.
Awww, I always kind of felt bad for that person. Hilarious though.
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!
I believe this is the Black Ice mod for Hearts of Iron 3
Foxhole? I’ve heard that that game has hella logistics
Thanks! I’ll look into it
the grind got so shitty the logistics players actually went on strike
Have you tried dwarf fortress?
Oh, you lost your leg to an elephant ? Here’s a crutch, go learn how to use it.
Not military but have you tried oxygen not included? That game will give you trench foot.
Not really military logistics, but you might check out Captain of Industry. Everything sort of depends on everything else. You need food for your workers. But you need building parts to make farms. So you need bricks, iron, wood, and concrete. Each of these has a building and process associated with it. You need trucks to move materials. You need excavators. So you also need factories making vehicle parts, and maintainence parts. And all of these machines and processes make a waste product you have to deal with.
Try some hex and counter war games.
Foxhole is a good game but probably not as grindy as you are looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You should play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I’ve finished it and it’s awesome. Wear headphones. It’s on Gamepass if you have an Xbox.
The game’s narrative serves as a metaphor for the character’s struggle with psychosis, as Senua, who suffers from the condition but believes it to be a curse, is haunted by an entity known as the “Darkness”, voices in her head known as “Furies”, and memories from her past. To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people living with the condition.
Also has a vr mode. Super spooky.
One of the best VR games for the immersion factor.
You should check out Dead Space 3 co-op mode. It’s basically what you described here.
Vampire The Masquarade Bloodlines.
Pick the Malkevian clan.
You’ll talk to stopsigns and be interrogated by your own TV.
I’m thinking about ways to implement other mental health conditions. Generally staying on the lower end of severity because I’m more familiar with it, but you could represent anger issues by having skill checks when other characters do seemingly innocuous things, and if you fail all the dialogue options are bad. ADHD could be done with a required mini game of correctly identifying all the steps in a process and having cooldowns between them to reflect executive disfunction. Hyperfocus could be implemented with certain objectives not being completeable, or even showing up in the game anywhere outside of dialogue, until one is. Seasonal affective disorder could be shown with a characters stats just drastically dropping when the seasons change, and the HUD colour scheme becoming more muted.
So kind of like some of the simulations that exist to allow people a glimpse of what it is like to suffer from schizophrenia with audible and visual hallucinations, constant repetititious dialogue in your head etc, that I have seen videos of. I don’t think they’re widely available, but if someone made an actual fleshed out game with that, I agree it would be really cool. Unfortunately the stigma that still exists regarding mental illness would make it hard for anyone to really go for it, unless it was entirely indie.
SimEarth remake with a proper geologic and climate model.
All the newer games in that mode feel like they’re all about growing the predefined lifeforms.
SimEarth was more about making the planet to support the lifeforms.
cries in Spore
That game was such a disappointment.
I quite like it, what do you dislike?
You are one species. I want to play god.
Spent all their time on a cool creature customizer, but the actual gameplay is pretty shallow.
There are plenty of God simulators, but that’s not what Spore’s about. You could try Black and White, for instance.
In that vein, a remake of Sim Life using neural networks and all the latest “learning” and “evolving” tech.
Hollow Knight Silksong :(
I sympathise. While, I am not a fan of Hollow Knight’s combat and platforming, I loved it’s world. It was just too difficult for me to get through.
That’s fair. I hope they tone down the difficult in the sequel. I was able to get through the base game, but the extra content is just way too difficult.
But that was the point of the DLCs. Fans complained that there werent any truly challenging parts to the game. So you could opt into Nightmare King Grimm if you wanted a hard boss right. Normal Grimm is pretty easy by comparison.
Still wasnt enough so you got Godseeker mode with pure vessel and true radiance - you cant find these if you aren’t into hard boss fights. Path of Pain was introduced for a hard platform level. Doing these things gives you nothing so it’s completely optional.
I think this is a very fair approach to difficulty. I love hard metroidvanias but wouldnt want to exclude anyone from Hollow Knight (just give me something optional and difficult somewhere).
That’s a fair point. Just like Malenia being hidden away behind multiple layers of secrets. It’s content made only for the hardest of the hardcore fans.
Meanwhile I was unable to clear even the first boss. But, whatever I saw of the world was amazing.
I think the only reason I got as far as I did, which was to the Mantis Lord’s fight, is because of Hyper focusing lol and being a masochist.
A game where you play a reporter in a pre-internet open world, digging through meetings, documents, connections and surveillance to get information to create stories.
You could have relationships with people too, and test them. Go with a private story on someone that will get big views and make the rent but piss them off, or keep it private and maintain your relationship to access their connections to try for a bigger story.Honestly? Just a modern, improved take on an old WiiWare game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.
There is nothing all that special about MLaaK on the surface: It’s just a management sim with a Final Fantasy theme to it. Place buildings. Get soldiers (well, here ‘adventurers’), send them out on missions. Get resources, invest them. In fact taken as a management sim it’s very barebones and not that great?
The thing is, no video game ever has, in my eye, captured the feeling of being Fairytale Royalty. You have direct control over the king character (who is a 12 year old because. Final Fantasy) – You walk around town. You want to see an overview of incomes and expenses? Go talk to your assistant and she’ll give you a report. Want something built? Point to the plot and ring the chime to call a servant and say ‘Magic college here’. Sending adventurers on their quests involves directly talking to them, and you can read their mood on how they react to the assignment, with motivated adventurers doing better. And when they return wounded you can visit them in the hospital for a boost to their morale and your popularity.
Also the higher the happiness level in the kingdom, the more citizens choose to stop and salute you, and the later you can wander around your town without your servants going “you’re underaged and royal and it’s dangerous at night, back to the castle now”, because your subjects like you.
Idk, these small touches made the game feel very special for me back then, I’ve been chasing that high since. Shout out to Fable 3 for the variety of nice royalish clothes your character could try on, but no shout outs to it for anything else.
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 dig this one, it’s pretty cool.
VR tourism. Or even better: VR historical tourism!!!
No points, no battles, no level ups, no upgrades. Just exploring faraway or historical places.
Exists and is free. Lookup The Dawn of Art. Includes narration by Daisy Ridley.
A metal gear type game where the AI is trained on how all players play worldwide and it adapts and evolves over time in how it stations and uses its soldiers against you and for patrols. Every time you go back to play, the layouts and movements and gear and reactions of enemy AI differ.
