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.
What about Panic Disorder Survival Horror? You have to get through a full week, including 5 work days, 2 social events, and an errand…except you can have a panic attack at any time but also have a heart condition, so you’re not sure if you’re really having a panic attack or heart attack. If you guess wrong, you lose. Also you have to have a completely empty bladder and colon so you don’t soil yourself at work and get fired or in a social setting and lose friends out of embarrassment if you happen to have a panic attack in those settings. Easy mode comes with a script for xanax. Hard mode comes with an abusive stalker ex and their family.
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.
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 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.
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”.
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.
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.
It exists in a very simple way https://framesynthesis.com/drivingsimulator/maps/
I used to play this all the time in high school and was thinking about it again last week out of the blue. Thank you for the nostalgia :)
Burnout or NFS! Also an SSX in this style would be amazing
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.
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!
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.
Foxhole is a good game but probably not as grindy as you are looking for.
Try some hex and counter war games.
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.
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.
This is so close to what I’d want, which is basically this + somewhat accurate recreations of real life places.
Imaginary places would work too, but the main thing I’d like is to have more maps to explore than I can deal with. I could spend hours just exploring and goofing around
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.
A game similar to the Expanse and Firefly. A space exploration, trading and combat game where you fly around a single solar system in a small ship and can also land on planets (please not procedurally generated though. Just make fewer places you can visit, but design them).
Oh, and with realistic Newtonian physics. Even if that means combat will be largely about who can fire the most missiles. But it would also mean you can avoid enemies altogether by planning the right planetary slingshot, millions of miles before you’d meet them.Outer Wilds comes close, but I’d love something more gritty, realistic and on a bigger scale.
Evochron. One dev, super dedicated to this concept.
So basically Anno 2307?
I haven’t played Anno 2205, but what your describing seems a bit further in time than that game. The start of colonization of the Moon vs settling/trading with the full solar system.
Elite Dangerous has some of those elements, not quite what you’re describing rhough
I didn’t watch the video yet but got damn the more I think about it the more I want it
Large scale battles with titans and the excellent pilot mobility mechanics? Sign me the fuck up.
It would be so fun!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
First person city planner, probably in vr where you can plan something out and then see your city grow as you walk around it
Cities VR is pretty close to that.
This sounds mint and I’m sad I’m too solodev to make it.
Fuck that, I believe in you friend. You can be the next Tynan. The next Concerned Ape. Today is the day, YOU GOT THIS!
Today is most certainly not the day, as I have covid and am mostly just sleeping. But thank you for believing in me lol
This but let me drive around too, maybe even free running like mirrors edge around the city I built
Planetside 2, but in Warhammer 40k. I want to be an ork running around krumpin gits with a hundred other boyz, smashin up some humie tinboyz or them big bug wotsits
Bonus points if you can be a psyker and blow up your whole squad
deleted by creator
That’s the easy part, you just have to be able to yell “WAAAAAGH!” while firing indiscriminately like a propa lad
Ethics aside, making the Space Marines pay-to-play while Orks are free would be hilarious, especially if the Orks still have higher odds of winning. Being a walking tank isn’t pay-to-win. You have to coordinate and not get overrun by sentient mushrooms with extra-shooty red guns. Get a few veteran tabletop players to pony up, and they’ll slice through a hundred randos without slowing down… while the survivors think it’s the coolest thing they’ve ever seen.
deleted by creator
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.
