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.
You should try Timberborn. It’s not exactly what you’re saying but one of the big parts is managing renewable resources like trees. If you cut them all down and don’t have someone replanting, you’re screwed.
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”.
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.
Two Point Hogwarts
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.
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 just want to play fun games that have a great and comprehendible story.
They would also need to be natively made for PC (along with any other platform that the devs/pubs might want). I understand why console ports exist but one can wish.
Some AAA game examples/concerns off the top of my head:
MGS V ? Fun gameplay, couldn’t make head or tail of the story without viewing content from others, and still I feel it’s way too confusing.
AC ? Things were in a good direction from a story standpoint at one point in time years ago but they lost it, didn’t enjoy the new RPG-like direction as much either. Gameplay was a power fantasy thing I guess. Whether I like it or not is dependent on my mood during the session.
Skyrim ? Fun game, never got around to actually “finishing” the game because there would always be a break and I would entirely forget where and what I was doing earlier.
Souls-likes ? I don’t have a problem admitting that my skills are pretty sucky. Effort required to the rewards are pretty bad for me, and there is no particular story that I have seen other than community theories.
I’m working on my years long backlog, in case anyone wants to make recommendations it’ll probably take a long time for me to get to it if it isn’t in the current list…
I read AC as Animal Crossing first and was so confused, especially about the power fantasy part.
For any other idiots like me, I think it’s supposed to be Assassin’s Creed? Correct me if I’m wrong
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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!
dark souls 2 but good
You watch it boy, DS2 is best souls
Some jokes just shouldn’t be made. You should be ashamed of yourself.
A 2D pixel art farming simulator, but real industrial farming not the stardew valley idyllic farming type.
Baldur’s Gate 3 style CRPG set in a Cowboy Bebop/Firefly style universe.
Alternatively, the My Dinner With Andre arcade game from the Simpsons, either works.
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.
Spec Ops: The Line prequel lol
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.
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.
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.
A spiritual successor to the Black and White series, but VR. Who wouldn’t want to pet your pet mammalian Kaiju before tossing a fireball at the nearest enemy town with a spell gesture just because you can? =D
