I want to build various types of orbital and planetary megastructures like Isaac Arthur describes. Ixion has been the closest fix for me, but I want much larger structures than just a Stanford Torus. No idea how Ixion ends yet. But I’d like to see a lot more interior space available, vastly more green spaces, and experimentation with other styles of governance than capitalism. I want to walk and fly around whatever I build, preferably in VR. And while I wouldn’t object to the option, I don’t really care about fighting in this setting. I just want to build out a Dyson Sphere.
“Dyson Sphere Program” exists, it’s more focused on factory and logistics management. But the games central progression is to go from small factory to a Dyson Sphere powering multiple solar system
To get more specific, I think it would be fun to build out a single O’Neill Cylinder within a Dyson Swarm. For multiplayer, just give everybody their own cylinder. But I definitely don’t just want an overhead view. I want to build a little world that can fully explore in first person. And no damn microtransactions! The only exception I’d accept would be paying for other people’s models.
I’m not reading through all the comments to see if somebody has already mentioned these…
A game where you start out Godlike, superbuffed, maxed stats, best equipment whatever… but to progress through the game you slowly start to give up your gear, quit using your best skills (until they atrophy and are lost/drastically weakened) to end the game as a regular person just doing regular things. The catch would be to wrap a good story around why you’d be giving up all your cool shit.
A FPS that is split between the cutscenes of the warriors talking shit and the generals talking shit and the actual gameplay of you being a random nobody who is just trying to survive. You can’t pick up weapons, because you dont know how to use them or it draws attention and you get attacked directly by the soldiers of both armies. Maybe there’d be NPC’s at the beginning of the levels that you’d sorta be expected to try to keep alive but inevitably they would start to get picked off by cross fire, artillery, tanks, booby traps set by the fighting soldiers, etc.
An RPG where the basic game loop is kinda flipped. Where you’d expect to have random encounters and fights, you’d be able to see the mobs and the interactions would be more of the “Talk” or “Trade” variety but doing things like opening a door or crossing a bridge or equipping a weapon starts a fight. Usually your character would have something wrong with them… so like, going to sleep would leave you with sleep in your eye or groggy and trying to search or open things would start the encounter. Another example, your character’s let gets hurt and now your random encounter is with the cobblestones that you’re trying to walk on to get to the house of healing.
An RPG in the style of like the NES/SNES Final Fantasy games or the Earthbound/Mother series where you’re characters are trying to start a band and the Random Encounters aren’t fights but gigs. You finish the fights by either playing really well a type of music the crowd wants/likes, playing poorly or playing something the crowd doesn’t want/like until they kick you off stage. The goals are things like, getting better equipment, playing notable venues, making a name for yourselves and making it to “The Big Show”.
A proper and full Disco Elysium sequel with Harry’s ongoing adventures, maybe even with the prior game’s save file reasonably used as a starter for how things begin next time around. sicko-wistful
My dream for a Disco Elysium sequel would be set centuries in the future and the events in Revachol are only flavor text in a book somewhere. I like sequels that do stuff like that.
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.
VR biplane combat sim, with heavy emphasis on your plane as a location and an object. A massive but oddly fragile thing you can walk around, on the grass, for a real sense of scale. The prop-shaft is eye-level and there’s another four feet of plane above that. It’s this massive ungainly thing you have to climb onto, and then into, before convincing it to leave the ground. All so you can push it to the edges of its capabilities versus other google-wearing maniacs doing much the same.
The interwar period is just about ideal for the physicality of air combat. Speeds are comprehensibly low, while still blasting past anyone stuck on the dirt. The machine has a manageable number of controls, all bracingly direct, and you can watch the wings flex from whatever you ask of them. If you need to see ahead while taking off, you lean over the side.
All of this is suitable for a sitting-and-standing VR experience. You probably don’t have access to enough room for a proper walkaround. But you should readily develop enough of a feel to do proper barnstorming.
I am imagining the horrible graphics of Red Baron 3d (1998) played at a ludicrously crisp frame rate through VR goggles. The game had fast forward and play buttons because it took so long to fly over to the trenches or to ascend to a decent altitude. Solid idea though, it would be hectic with numerous biplanes dog fighting over France.
Edit: there are youtube videos of players using VR headsets and flying biplanes on IL-2 Sturmovik: Flying Circus (2019).
It'd actually be hilarious to have this set in the era when the pilot's handheld weaponry or even just throwing a goddamn brick at the other plane were viable tactics
It’d absolutely be an option. If nothing else, if you glance aside when you pass someone going the opposite direction, you are going to see the whites of their eyes and maybe a rude gesture. There’s every reason to let you twist in your chair and pop off with an old-timey revolver.
But if you fire it through the props, you will be landing ahead of schedule.
A biplane vr sim would be fun, there’s plenty of interactions to dive into, like adjusting the engines and clearing gun jams.
I’ve long wanted a single person tank/artillery simulator and guess I’ll just have to build it. Something about choosing a target and ammo type, grabbing shells from stowage, opening the breech, slamming it home, driving a tank and standing in a cupula just have vr interaction fun written all over.
Tank sims seem constrained and tactile for VR. You can poke your head out by standing up… whether or not the hatch is open. You’d just go through. Fabric-based aircraft are open enough that most movin’ around is a valid option, in real life, and the controls are simple and loose enough that a virtual stick will just about do.
? you’ve got interactions with the radio, map, gun comp, throttle, steering, all the parts of running the main gun… I see tons of opportunity and that’s before you add fuzzy dice and fancy keyrings and custom painting the beast lol
You can poke your head out by standing up… whether or not the hatch is open.
I’ve created a solution for this already. Well, two:
one is, while standing up to look out the hatch is fun, it’s probably better a seated game. I put a collision box near the underside that triggers the hatch to open. it’s still janky (not interpolating smoothly) but that’s just details.
the better way, imho, instead of standing from a seated position while wearing vr shit, which even with a quest is still janky in my experience, is just having a button to elevate the chair so they’re seated at the cupula rim. a quick fade in and fade out coming and going might help.
but tell you what, if I can make this happen, you make your sopwith sim and we’ll jam’em together so I can light up your lovely canvas with the commander’s ma-deuce! :D would love to have that in both games, swooping bomb runs and minitanks lol
Constrained in the sense that physical mechanisms would stop you, but a handheld controller cannot. Operating a tank is extremely tactile. There’s a literal ton of moving parts in a very tight space. It is a gun you are inside of.
Steel Battalion’s infamously enormous Xbox controller was halfway to a child’s toy dashboard because the only way to convey all those fiddly dials and levers was to actually provide them. Complexity within the game is not the same experience. It has to be present in-person. Quitting is not a menu option; it’s an ejection key you grip with white knuckles until the last second.
The HOTAS experience for some Red Baron shit is a Wiimote duct-taped to a broomstick. Force feedback would be massively better, but the stick not corresponding to the plane is a realistic possibility when things go fully pear-shaped. This goal and available technology align especially well.
I’d argue the ideal home tank game is a smartphone app you slot in front of the itty-bitty window of a glorified Rubbermaid container before climbing inside. Map all the thumbsticks and triggers of a generic controller onto widgets and switches on the lid. Disguise the main cannon’s foam round having nowhere to go by curling it down and back into the magazine when you shove it forward. Convey recoil within that tube by projecting a ring of light that slides back and forth.
… now I’m wondering how cheaply you could do a low-friction bowl so the whole thing can rock unpredictably with your center-of-gravity. Maybe just make the bottom round, and extend little legs when the treads are still.
I’d argue the ideal home tank game is a smartphone app you slot in front of the itty-bitty window of a glorified Rubbermaid container before climbing inside. Map all the thumbsticks and triggers of a generic controller onto widgets and switches on the lid. Disguise the main cannon’s foam round having nowhere to go by curling it down and back into the magazine when you shove it forward. Convey recoil within that tube by projecting a ring of light that slides back and forth.
I’d love a VRMMO like an actual Sword Art Online. Of course, I don’t even have a VR system. However, if there were a nice VRMMO, I’d shell out the money for one.
Farming/homesteading colony sim with procgen plant species that you have to learn to cultivate. Models soil conditions and how they relate to nutritional profiles of the crops. For something that’s such a integral part of survival i feel like a lot of games just handwave agriculture.
I’ve always yearned for something like this too. I wonder if, from the dev’s perspective, balancing the years and years such a thing would take in real time conflicts with other aspects of gameplay? Or maybe soil chemistry is too difficult a thing to gamify for a casual player (including myself in this- unfortunately I don’t grasp chemistry or physics easily).
A colony sim/resource management game in early access I played recently tries to touch on this actually- Farthest Frontier. As you might imagine from what I typed above, I’m heinously bad at grasping the system, but the building blocks are in there! None of the procgen ideas you’re interested in though.
It’s really not that fun, you don’t do that stuff unless you have in real life, or you’re obsessed. Plus there’s also too much random chance, it would beincredibly complex and likely crash your computer if it was at all accurate
something like this integrated with space exploration would be super cool as well. im thinking: you can travel to different planets and collect plants from them and they have different genetic traits that you can bring back to your farm and crossbreed them with your plants with a somewhat accurate replication of mendelian and non-mendelian genetics. or maybe this is just my own fantasy as a biologist lmao.
A similar-to-stellaris grand strategy space game where the main movement mechanic is plotting orbits.
Also it would be really cool if that game had simulated atmospheres on the planets so terraforming and developing them becomes a more in depth ecological and climate project, rather than just paying credits for habitability.
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.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, unfortunately; doing shit is where the money comes from, and even a bad idea can make you rich if you follow through on it and get lucky.
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.
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