There's train and farming and driving sims. Trains and tractors and cars have fan bases. So do spacecraft. Why isn't there a high-quality realistic spacecraft sim? I want the experience of flying Vostok 1 and Apollo 11.
Set in your standard British mansion with the usual cast of characters. Player 1 commits a murder, then sends the game state to player 2 who must attempt to solve it.
Make a free RPG or maybe a fighting game full of thirst trap characters. Sell porn of them rather than leaving that to third parties.
Casual gardening sim with a garden gnome obsession. Monetise via gnome IAPs.
Contract with an animal rights organisation to make a disturbingly realistic simulation of animal slaughter to drive home the reality of meat consumption.
Meditative game where players are monks in a monastery, adhering to the rules and doing simple tasks.
You are a Time Agent returning to a point in time each time your mission fails. You learn things, but you're also hunted by enemy agents who are looking for weird behaviour - like knowing things you shouldn't be able to know.
You have been chosen for the great honour of being a human sacrifice. Spend your last day talking to your people to find out what to say and ritual items to carry onto the pyre to best soothe their fears and create good omens.
OK, maybe I'm missing something here, but why aren't there more games about Hogwarts-esque magic schools? Any mix of RPG, dating sim, story-driven adventure. Different types of magic could require different skills: coordination, logic, memorisation...
There are plenty of strategy games where you play conquerors and criminals. Why not something more wholesome where you run an union?
A low-brow comedy game making fun of Platformers About Feelings and other overused indie game tropes.
ASCII dungeon crawl game where the world is made of concrete poetry (typographical arrangements of text into shapes).
You are tasked with making incredible-machine style machines to do certain tasks. You score higher for making cheaper machines. But: you can use cheap, unreliable parts, and you can re-run the validation until it randomly succeeds...
Based on the absurd Soyuz scene at the end of Gravity, you are in a spaceship and must fly it somewhere. Unfortunately, you can't read the language the controls are in and the manual you have is very very badly translated.
A strategy game. Strange men in black ships have arrived on your shores. They bring weapons and foreign gods, but they are few in number. They are looking for gold and allies.
With their help, you could throw off the yoke of your overlords...
Ancient texts, ciphers, special editions, notes in the margins, hidden writing. All that good stuff a la Necronomicon / Ninth Gate, basically bookpunk.
An adventure / puzzle game with lovingly rendered grimoires.
A deeply cynical war game where all decisions are subject to the whims of an unstable, egomanaical, distractable Great Leader. Can you steer him towards achieving your aims without him noticing that he's being manipulated? Can you get your enemies purged?
Turns out that you can't eat bullets. A farming sim in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Trading games usually just do "buy low, sell high" and then add enemies and missions to spice things up.
But real trading is also about relationships and understanding demand and appraisal and maps...
You know that super satisfying feeling of thoroughly cleaning something? This game has you manually excavate buildings and artefacts, slowly revealing the past.
Action game with shadow of the colossus style monster climbing, but you're the world's most foolhardy veterinary doctor.
Combination diner dash and tower defense. Open the first sandwich shop in Innsmouth. Construct defenses to slice/roast horrid sea creatures coming ashore, put them into sandwiches, and deliver them to customers.
Airships: Conquer the Skies In Space
Naturalist Game
Eastshade meets Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Peaceful exploration game where you visit islands and study and classify the local life.
Murder/cooking game. Gain points both for elegant murders and the delicious dishes you cook from your victims.
Post-apocalyptic adventure where you play the secretly superintelligent dog companion of a lone survivor.
Crafting/gardening/adventure game where you play a local witch. Go on adventures to get new ingredients. Experiment to figure out new potions. The game also happens to teach you the scientific method.
Basically the council of Nicea as a theological action brawler.
Hitman: Go meets Crypt of the Necrodancer.
Play as four survivors staving off monster of the week hordes until daybreak. Mechanically heavily inspired by Into the Breach. (Enemy move preview, aim is to survive a limited number of turns.)
Your disciples are following you around and writing down everything you do and say. Once you're gone, they will use these stories to construct a theology. So, no pressure: what do you do and say?
The old king is dying, and there is no clear heir. Who will gain the throne? Conspire and backstab in a series of beautiful rooms to position yourself as the king wastes away.
Mash up the gameplay of The Binding of Isaac with the space setting of FTL: Faster than Light. Fast-paced positional ability-combo-heavy space shooter where you are travelling towards a goal.
Or, heh, mash it up the other way around...
Hey, some people can't or don't want to take drugs. Surely we can do something with shaders to simulate what the visuals are like? Based on extensive personal research?
Stock market simulation. You are a devil and the stocks are souls. There is no such thing as FTC rules in soul trading...
Detailed character setup screen for a post-collapse RPG.
"Start Game" leads to a screen explaining that actually, your character died in the collapse. And that societal collapse isn't a secular Last Judgement where certain virtues will be rewarded, you twerps.
Shut Up & Derive
Single-player version of Keep Talking and Nobody explodes with higher math puzzles.
Not as much a game as a tool to set up VR spaces for BDSM play. Get all the ambiente of a proper dungeon in the comfort of your living room.
DJ simulator. Choose tracks based on audience mood and preferences. Points for good/clever track transitions and scratching.
The ship of Lord Shatterwhip, first of the Whip Lords, has crashed in the white wastes. Will your sect be the first to reach the ship, witness its woe, salvage its secrets, and ascend to world domination?
More tomorrow...
RTS where you herd groups of tourists through the wilderness, allowing them to get those all-important selfies without getting gored by the wildlife.
Partner with a sexual health organisation to make free porn games that have healthy relationships and safe sex while still being super hot
Would this work to raise awareness and sympathy (not empathy ugh) for refugees?
Starfighter F-104g
Military funeral / flight simulator. Meditation on the military-industrial complex.
Over-dramatic self-subversive horny retro space RPG.
Grimdark dieselpunk and monsters mech game.
You startwith a garden hoe. You are in a garden, and there's a plant bed next to you, and also some figures in the distance. If you use the hoe on the plant bed, the game is a gardening sim. If you approach the figures, they're zombies and it's a brawler. Forever.
Squad-based exploration/fighting game where you rid old mansions of ghosts. Think XCOM meets Ghostbusters.
Investigation RPG set in a mildly fairy-tale Europe. Witches are real, and are really bad, consorting with Satan to bring ruin upon communities. But in 90% of cases, suspected witchcraft is just bad luck and slander. Your job is to find the right 10%.
Superhero game that combines really fun player powers with a deconstruction of the power dynamics of superhero narratives, basically Strong Female Protagonist the game.
Turn-based or slow-realtime heist game played in detailed block-based 3D environments. A heist is like a puzzle you need to unlock.
There is also a preparation phase where you can buy maps and bribe people.
Fly around the asteroid belt looking for valuable rocks. Encounter pirates and strange alien artefacts.
(This one gets a mention because it's the first proper game I tried to make. Didn't get that far.)
Tycoon game where you run a social media site. Can you get it to grow? What about your advertisers? What about your immortal soul, eh?
Hunt whales in the heyday of Nantucket whaling. Navigate increasingly disturbing and prophetic dreams.
4X or grand strategy game with a more detailed way to develop new vehicles: you set out your aims for what you want to achieve, and then develop them. The more ambitious your aims, the more likely there are complications.
State of the art physics simulation toy that lets you break things. What happens when you drop one tonne of custard onto a priceless Ming vase?
In Alpha Centauri, you start your game after one year on the planet. I want a game about that first year. Narrative strategy game about survival segueing into society building.
Combine old-school tile-based RPGs with modern hardware to make a truly massive game world. Large enough that things can be genuinely hidden simply because the world is so large. Make maps, rumours, the costs of traversing terrain matter.
Military shooters are incredibly US-centric. Let's break that. Let's make a heroic shooter about the Vietnamese resisting US aggression. Or about the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war.
The SFW version of the porn monetisation above. Make a character-driven game, hint at as many romantic combinations as possible, then do auctions where people can bid on which pairing should be canon.
(Then hide in a bunker from the backlash?)
Dexterity game like Super Monkey Ball or Glider. All levels are winnable by simply not touching the controls.
Reading and watching things about ancient to medieval warfare, I'm struck by how much terrain and engineering mattered. Romans building forts *during* battles. Hills and rivers changing things radically. A strategy game about this.
Survival game similar to Don't Starve, but the things you need to know to survive are randomised each world. What is edible? What are the crafting recipes? To get better, the player must develop meta-strategies rather than just memorise solutions.
Sunless Sea, but systems-based. The history of expansion into new territory is simulated, creating a coherent world of connections and needs for the player to interact with.
Turn-based hack and slash RPG with heavy focus on using the environment and keeping multiple enemies off balance. Kick chairs into people, flip tables, brandish torches, drop chandeliers...
DF-like with a focus on raiding villages to gain glory.
Magic casting game where you make elaborate magical circles with symbols and dribbly candles and skulls and stuff.
Old-school RPG set during the French revolution or a fictional version thereof. Heavy focus on events moving independently of player actions, enabled by low-fi environments and modern tools. Don't expect to be able to just return to something later!
A survival/building game with quasi-permadeath. When you die, the world fast-forwards a few decades, causing things to decay. Food spoils, animals escape, tools break, structures crumble.
Adventure game where the protagonist(s) is aware that they are in a TV show and must somehow both fulfil their quest and do it in a sufficiently exciting way that their show is not cancelled.
Comedy co-op game where you play three kids in a trenchcoat trying to go to the movies. Bottom kid/player is the feet, middle the arms, top the voice. All very wobbly.
One player makes the bombs, one hides them, one finds them, one disarms them.
Given that AI Dungeon is a thing, and L4D had an "AI Director" (which AFAIK was AI in the game sense, no machine learning), could we now use machine learning to make a game master for a dungeon crawl?
In the post-civilization future, the main source of raw materials will be landfills. Scavenge and sort through the refuse of those strange ancient times of limitless technology and limitless folly.
Play an enslaved peasant in the country near ancient Athens, toiling away. Occasionally you get a popup indicating that some philosopher has come up with a cool idea.
Also, I'm pretty sure you could turn Dungeons and Discourse (dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dun…) into an actual game.
2 player chat game. Player A is a human being. Player B is 50/50 an AI or a human being that can only choose between 5 AI-written replies. Can A guess humanity correctly?
You are a nature spirit tasked with defending a sacred forest from human encroachment by messing with the humans until they run away screaming. (95/100)
Political education game where you use gerrymandering, redlining, voter suppression and similar tactics to keep black and working-class people down.
You are a giant living starship moving between stars at sublight speed, unfurling your solar sail and hibernating. Navigate solar winds and gravity, spread life and knowledge through the cosmos.
Use your phone's vast array of cameras to make a 3D map of your living room, load it into your computer or console, and have adventures.
Uses web cam and microphone to assess your facial expression and voice. Can you manage a good wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command?