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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly nothing so far. Most city builders for modern cities tend to use the sim city simplistic zoning model, ignore verticality and building is super-fast and stuff does not have maintenance costs once built. They also mostly focus on cars and mass transit, not so much walking and biking.
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
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.
Aesthetically, but imagine you’re waiting for a tank to spawn in, and a brick by brick building animation plays before it’s ready. And everything blows up to a spectacle of bricks flying
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.
Eco is a total dumpster fire of ‘who can speedrun latestage capitalism the fastest and kill the server’. The only times I’ve had a successful server experience is when I lie my way into government then stranglehold the economy into being not capitalism so the general population can actually participate in the fun parts of the game. Anyway I have a thousand hours in it one of my favorite games, the only game I have with more recorded playtime is Factorio.
Well, that’s sad to hear. I remember playing it in the beginning, and most of the servers I joined at least tried to protect the environment. I guess times have changed, it’s been a few years since I actively played it.
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.
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 don’t know. It’s Ubisoft after all and the game seems to be very focused on ship battles and multiplayer. I don’t expect a great story or detailed environments like Red Dead Redemption 2 had.
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.
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.
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.
Possibly, but I was picturing being able to move around the ship and you would have to manage your crew by assigning roles. Almost like rimworld meets bridge crew meets star trek online.
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.
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.
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.