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OK, I'm doing laundry, so for entertainment, here's:

One like -> One game idea

My head is very full of far more ideas than fit into a lifetime. So maybe if I share them it's inspiring or amusing. #gamedev #games
Spacecraft Simulator

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.
Asynchronous Murder Mystery

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.
Sexy Monetization

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.
Gnome Garden

Casual gardening sim with a garden gnome obsession. Monetise via gnome IAPs.
Pig Butchering Sim

Contract with an animal rights organisation to make a disturbingly realistic simulation of animal slaughter to drive home the reality of meat consumption.
Monastic Order MMO

Meditative game where players are monks in a monastery, adhering to the rules and doing simple tasks.
Time Loop RPG

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.
Self-Sacrifice

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.
Magic School RPG

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...
Union Strategy Game

There are plenty of strategy games where you play conquerors and criminals. Why not something more wholesome where you run an union?
Indie Game: The Indie Game

A low-brow comedy game making fun of Platformers About Feelings and other overused indie game tropes.
Concrete Poetry Dungeon Crawl

ASCII dungeon crawl game where the world is made of concrete poetry (typographical arrangements of text into shapes).
Lowest Bidder, the Game

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...
Manual Translated by Bear. Is good Bear.

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.
You are a professor translating ancient inscriptions. Your country's increasingly rabidly nationalist government considers them to be part of the great national myth. But what they actually say doesn't match that at all. Can you do them justice *and* keep your job? Should you?
Colonizedation

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...
Grimoire Game

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.
Führerbunkersimulator

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?
Post-Apocalyptic Permaculture

Turns out that you can't eat bullets. A farming sim in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Trading Game

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...
A stealth game. You are a slave who wants to escape. Can you gather all the items you need for your escape while doing the tasks your masters give you?
A VR game where you as the protagonist are in a wheelchair. It's not about being in a wheelchair but it allows for seated movement controls.
Archeology Game

You know that super satisfying feeling of thoroughly cleaning something? This game has you manually excavate buildings and artefacts, slowly revealing the past.
A version of PowerPoint Karaoke where the audience can vote on which slide comes next. Slides often recontextualize previous slides, to trip up the speaker.
Monster Healer

Action game with shadow of the colossus style monster climbing, but you're the world's most foolhardy veterinary doctor.
Quick-play casual snowball battle game.
Eldritch Sandwich

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.
Remake/repurpose section upcoming:

Airships: Conquer the Skies In Space
Remake Escape Velocity with a focus on player generated content.
Remake SMAC with a focus on economy/environment/story rather than the war game bits that infest the civ series.
Remake P.A.W.S with a cat protagonist.
Instead of blatantly copying Dwarf Fortress' fortress mode, blatantly copy its use of deep procgen to make dungeoncrawl worlds.
Roguelike where you are a vampire with vampire powers but also weaknesses: crosses, garlic, arithmomania, holy water, the sun, crossing running water. Levels are puzzle-like and require you to move carefully.
OK, still more than 30 to go, so let's get going again.

Naturalist Game

Eastshade meets Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Peaceful exploration game where you visit islands and study and classify the local life.
Hannibal Lecter: The Game

Murder/cooking game. Gain points both for elegant murders and the delicious dishes you cook from your victims.
Dog's Best Friend

Post-apocalyptic adventure where you play the secretly superintelligent dog companion of a lone survivor.
Alchemy Game

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.
Theological Combat

Basically the council of Nicea as a theological action brawler.
Murder on the Dancefloor

Hitman: Go meets Crypt of the Necrodancer.
Cabin in the Woods

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.)
Prophet Simulator

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?
Court Intrigue

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.
Party like it's 2012

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...
Acid Trip Simulator

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?
Soul Trader

Stock market simulation. You are a devil and the stocks are souls. There is no such thing as FTC rules in soul trading...
After the Fall

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.
A historical strategy game set in a badly researched and misunderstood mish-mash of the 18th to 20th centuries, as viewed from the 22nd century with very imperfect records.
The next three are inspired by Rihanna songs.

Shut Up & Derive

Single-player version of Keep Talking and Nobody explodes with higher math puzzles.
S&M

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.
Don't Stop the Music

DJ simulator. Choose tracks based on audience mood and preferences. Points for good/clever track transitions and scratching.
Shatterwhip Down

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...
Tourist Wrangler

RTS where you herd groups of tourists through the wilderness, allowing them to get those all-important selfies without getting gored by the wildlife.
Ooh, here's another porn one:

Partner with a sexual health organisation to make free porn games that have healthy relationships and safe sex while still being super hot
Mediterranean Sea Rescue Simulator

Would this work to raise awareness and sympathy (not empathy ugh) for refugees?
Three games inspired by Welle: Erdball songs:

Starfighter F-104g

Military funeral / flight simulator. Meditation on the military-industrial complex.
Die Begegnung

Over-dramatic self-subversive horny retro space RPG.
Feindsender 64,3: Nachtprogramm

Grimdark dieselpunk and monsters mech game.
Hoe 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.
Surgeon Simulator but for Chiropractic
Exorcist Game

Squad-based exploration/fighting game where you rid old mansions of ghosts. Think XCOM meets Ghostbusters.
Witchfinder

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%.
Superversion

Superhero game that combines really fun player powers with a deconstruction of the power dynamics of superhero narratives, basically Strong Female Protagonist the game.
Not Subversion

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.
Asteroid Prospector

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.)
Social Media Website Tycoon

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?
Leviathan

Hunt whales in the heyday of Nantucket whaling. Navigate increasingly disturbing and prophetic dreams.
R&D

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.
Smash Splash Crash

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?
The First Year

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.
A FPS/action game with a tutorial voice that starts out telling you clearly factual things like "press space to jump" and then slowly moves towards things like "exterminate those monstrous beings". How long does it take the player to break with their mentor?
StumbleUpon

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.
ʎʇnp ɟo llɐƆ

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.
Shipping Forecast

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?)
Gotcha Ball

Dexterity game like Super Monkey Ball or Glider. All levels are winnable by simply not touching the controls.
Military Engineering

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.
A New World (Each Time)

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.
Frontier Worldgen

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.
Tavern Brawler

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...
Pokemon go style location-based co-op game where you're scientists exploring an alien world.
The most fun part of 4X games is the early exploration and base setup. Have bases move inexorably, abandoning old tiles and finding new ones, to have this experience be constant throughout the game.
Orcish horde game

DF-like with a focus on raiding villages to gain glory.
Dribbly Candles

Magic casting game where you make elaborate magical circles with symbols and dribbly candles and skulls and stuff.
Revolutionary RPG

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!
Remake Imperialism II, maybe in a different setting, as it's the only 4X game that ever really managed to avoid late-game slowdown thanks to the clever way its economy works.
Fast Forward

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.
Wallbreaker

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.
One.... ticket... please...

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.
PvP Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

One player makes the bombs, one hides them, one finds them, one disarms them.
ML Dungeon

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?
Garbage Sorter

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.
City on the Hill

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.
A game where you play as the ancient Mesopotamian copper trader and general nuisance Ea Nasir: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint…
Dole out two-fisted justice in the harbor town of Myra in this religious/historical brawler/adventure game where you play St Nicholas.
100 likes. Going to stop at 100 game ideas, which should be enough. :P

Also, I'm pretty sure you could turn Dungeons and Discourse (dresdencodak.com/2006/12/03/dun…) into an actual game.
Turing Box

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?
Defender of the Grove

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)
Redline Miami

Political education game where you use gerrymandering, redlining, voter suppression and similar tactics to keep black and working-class people down.
Starsail

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.
Shrinkify

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.
Bronze Age King Simulator

Uses web cam and microphone to assess your facial expression and voice. Can you manage a good wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command?
Relaxing gouillotine minigame where you decapitate the super-rich for doing nothing while the planet burned.
You are a policeman in an oppressive regime, tasked with interrogating political prisoners. But you are secretly on their side. You must pursue your interrogation in a way that avoids turning up any important information while still appearing to do your job.
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