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 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
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.
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”.
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.
Warcraft III had maps called "RP Maps", which were kindof like D&D placing things, except everyone had the same control over the map. So it became more about telling a story rather than one person leading a group's game for them.
When wc3 kindof died off that kindof game along with many others didn't leave it. SCII mapmakers tried but it had issues with the complexity, and with SCII not allowing traditional saving for long sessions.
A lot of sandbox games are cool, but built around FPS engines instead of anything third person.
Hey I made a roleplaying inspired Starcraft 1 map back in the day! Player 1 was the DM, I had different ways to spawn and send units to various parts of the map, or resources to players. So I would do things like spawn in a neutral and a hostile faction and be like ‘there are bandits fucking with the locals’ or whatever. Whoever went in and saved them I could pop another trigger to gift the neutral units to that player, or I could gift resources. It was clunky but a lot of fun.
I remember some of the roleplay maps with automated ‘DMs’ were really interesting. I was much more interested in playing with a live DM though so I built that map in the hopes that the style got enough traction for me to be a player. It did not take off though compared to the auto roleplay ones
If you haven’t played it, Battlefield 4’s commander mode sounds kind of like what you’re describing. People are still online (at least on PC) and welcoming to commanders.
Any type of game (sandbox, RTS, etc) where the landscape changes dynamically.
All games are either player vs player or player vs mobs or player vs game-mechanics-that-affect-your-stats. But I have never played a game where I have to consider a river overflowing and destroying a village, or an avalanche, or earthquakes.
Even when there are environmental hazards, the base map never changes. Rivers never change their course, islands don’t appear or disappear, oceans don’t dry up, dams don’t burst, quarries aren’t excavated.
The world and nature are always dead and static.
Edit:
Actually, Dwarf Fortress does tick those boxes quite often.
Check out Timberborn, it doesn’t check all of your boxes but a lot of it revolves around water management - building dams and reservoirs, diverting rivers, surviving dry seasons, etc. At its core it’s just a fun city building game and I highly recommend it if that sounds good to you. It’s 20% off ok Steam right now too.
I would love a game with a timeloop built into the discovery, combat, and storytelling mechanics, a la Deathloop and Prey: Mooncrash, but instead of a first person shooter about murder, make it an isometric heist game that doesn’t hold your hand. You gather clues and tips and tricks through each loop and through exploration, until you build a final plan of attack to end the loop.
Deathloop’s biggest flaw was not playing into the fact that it was, at its core, a puzzle game. The objective markers and notes kind of ruined the climax of the game for me. Absolutely incredible otherwise.
Loop Hero has some interesting time loop stuff that is very well merged into the story and mechanics. It isn’t a particularly complex game and is a rogue-lite
There was at least one timeloop game based on a murder mystery that got pretty good reviews that came out on Steam a couple years ago and had an isometric perspective. I don’t remember the name, but those keywords are probably enough.
Also of course there’s 12 Minutes, which could be described is basically identical wording but is actually not the game I was thinking of.
Edit: “The Sexy Brutale” is what I was thinking of. Other titles include The Forgotten City and Elsinore.
i want to first person, in VR frolic in the fields as a small furry animal, along with others MMO. could sweet fun sunshine therapy or watership down traumatic violence or crazy furry social scene.
can i be a young squirrel chasing others around a tree in the lazy afternoon?
Person has an idea for an X-men RPG, conceptualised a little too well and loves it so much they cursed themselves with the awareness of difficulty of game development and it’s non-existence.
Decides to make a video and spread the curse to X-men and JRPG fans alike.
A physics based surfing game that has procedural coastline generation using seeds. The wave fluid physics interacts with the different coasts to create different surfing conditions along with some swell randomization parameters. SimSurfer.
All I want is a mod for Left 4 Dead 2 in which you choose one of the Team Fortress 2 mercs as your character instead of the normal survivors. All weapon pickups just become ammo / metal, etc. Not quite sure if being downed should just be eliminated, due to easy healing from the medic, the dispenser, the sandvich, etc… But the respawn closets should function the same.
I don’t care if it breaks the difficulty curve or dialogue, I just want it to function and be fun.
A classic first-person dungeon crawler, but co-op and with a classless skill-based system.
Games like Ultima Underworld, Arena, Daggerfall, Descent to Undermountain, Battlespire, Arx Fatalis... those games are my jam, and they have basically died off. My favorite RPG systems also tend to be skill-based rather than class-based, and Asheron's Call (the original) had one of my favorite systems. I'm also all about co-op these days... so I want a co-op dungeon crawler with a skill-based system that looks and feels modern, like a natural evolution of those classics. And it has to be more than a hack-and-slash... it needs to have the depth and immersion of tabletop dungeon crawlers.
I've actually been working on it for a while now in UE. It's purely a hobby/passion project, so who knows if I'll ever have something to distribute... but since nobody else has been bothered to make it*, I will.
Barony is closest, but it's too deliberately old-school for my tastes... and Dark & Darker is a little too repetitive and undermined by the PvP.