New concepts in games

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People tend to think "if I can just come up with the next BIG IDEA I'll be rich, famous, whatever their particular thing is. So they tend to keep their speculations to themselves, because maybe it's crazy or maybe it is that next big idea and they don't want someone to steal it.

I don't care if my ideas get stolen, because I know I'm not going to do anything with them anyway. I do think they are either crazy, or well beyond my capacity to put into action, or both...so this is a good place for them. If someone manages to steal one and pitch it to the right person and they manage to make something of it and get a little rich or famous...or even a lot...great.

I think a lot of people have similarly potential ideas cluttering up their heads. So let's dump them out and see what happens. Maybe a few years down the line we'll be able to say "yeah, that ___________ guy that made the ___________...I saw that same idea on this game forum back in the day."


I have two, to start off with.

First, one that I always think is silly but it keeps coming back to me...Plant Simulator. There are a lot of critical decisions to be made by a plant. Do I need more roots, or more leaves? If I opt for leaves and there's a dry spell I'm gonna wish for those roots... And what about those roots anyway? Should I just spread out? Send down some tap roots looking for the elusive water table? Maybe invest in sending a root under that foundation into the parched wasteland in hopes that I'll find a leaky pipe?

I mean, obviously it is pretty low key. Maybe something for the casual gamer...


Second, a VR game called something like I'm with the Band. Take the Guitar Hero or even better the various learn guitar by using a real guitar as an input device games into the world of being on stage and jamming with an actual band. Might even be a multi-player mode in there somehow. I just notice that a lot of people are learning enough to actually play, but they have no clue how to interact with other players, and VR could bridge that gap.
 
I have long thought that firefighting in the American West would make a great game. Only a few firefighters working across a huge area supplemented by air units. Some areas, with buildings are more important than empty places. The wind and rain are unpredictable. I know nothing about this subject. I would like a simulation of historic fires so that I might learn a little something about this.
 
Plant Simulator
A mobile phone game that you play now and then as plant grows flowers and goes to seed.
So you have to water and feed the plant maybe prune it etc if it is to grow big and strong.
Harder plants require more interventions per day easy ones you may not have to water every day.
The more plants you grow the better and you get green fingers so you have to make less interventions and so can grow harder plants.
Tamagotchi? Or keep your pet alive? I like the idea of a plant simulator that needs less than daily attention. Add insects for pollination and seeds.
 
I have two, to start off with.

First, one that I always think is silly but it keeps coming back to me...Plant Simulator. There are a lot of critical decisions to be made by a plant. Do I need more roots, or more leaves? If I opt for leaves and there's a dry spell I'm gonna wish for those roots... And what about those roots anyway? Should I just spread out? Send down some tap roots looking for the elusive water table? Maybe invest in sending a root under that foundation into the parched wasteland in hopes that I'll find a leaky pipe?

I mean, obviously it is pretty low key. Maybe something for the casual gamer...


Second, a VR game called something like I'm with the Band. Take the Guitar Hero or even better the various learn guitar by using a real guitar as an input device games into the world of being on stage and jamming with an actual band. Might even be a multi-player mode in there somehow. I just notice that a lot of people are learning enough to actually play, but they have no clue how to interact with other players, and VR could bridge that gap.
I like both of those. Does the VR guitar come with a karaoke option?
 
I like both of those. Does the VR guitar come with a karaoke option?

Actually, that would be good too. A lot of people with good voices are good at karaoke, but have no clue how to interact with real live musicians and they could make that transition in VR.


Plant Simulator
A mobile phone game that you play now and then as plant grows flowers and goes to seed.
So you have to water and feed the plant maybe prune it etc if it is to grow big and strong.
Harder plants require more interventions per day easy ones you may not have to water every day.
The more plants you grow the better and you get green fingers so you have to make less interventions and so can grow harder plants.

That's a different kind of plant simulator than I was thinking. I wanna be the plant.

I know, I know...some people are saying I have started practicing too soon.
 
People tend to think "if I can just come up with the next BIG IDEA I'll be rich, famous, whatever their particular thing is. So they tend to keep their speculations to themselves, because maybe it's crazy or maybe it is that next big idea and they don't want someone to steal it.

I don't care if my ideas get stolen, because I know I'm not going to do anything with them anyway. I do think they are either crazy, or well beyond my capacity to put into action, or both...so this is a good place for them. If someone manages to steal one and pitch it to the right person and they manage to make something of it and get a little rich or famous...or even a lot...great.

I know a guy who has the same take on his ideas - so he regularly writes to CEOs with his thoughts on what their company could be doing. Sometimes he gets a response.

Second, a VR game called something like I'm with the Band. Take the Guitar Hero or even better the various learn guitar by using a real guitar as an input device games into the world of being on stage and jamming with an actual band. Might even be a multi-player mode in there somehow. I just notice that a lot of people are learning enough to actually play, but they have no clue how to interact with other players, and VR could bridge that gap.

So in the vein of Rocksmith?
 
So in the vein of Rocksmith?

Yeah...I couldn't recall the name. That's a good fun guitar trainer, but it can only take you to a certain point. There comes a time when a guitar player has to sit with other guitar players and learn how a group keeps time and how to ad lib changes together. You can actually get so good at the mechanics from playing by yourself with these computer training programs that people expect you to know what you're doing when you try to play together and it gets frustrating.
 
Now days it seems that major indie games are more innovative/weird/open ended. The main example being minecraft.

Your main example of a "major indie game" is one that was released seven year ago and that for the majority of its existence has been owned and operated by what is currently the largest company in the world?
 
People tend to think "if I can just come up with the next BIG IDEA I'll be rich, famous, whatever their particular thing is. So they tend to keep their speculations to themselves, because maybe it's crazy or maybe it is that next big idea and they don't want someone to steal it.

I don't care if my ideas get stolen, because I know I'm not going to do anything with them anyway. I do think they are either crazy, or well beyond my capacity to put into action, or both...so this is a good place for them. If someone manages to steal one and pitch it to the right person and they manage to make something of it and get a little rich or famous...or even a lot...great.

I think a lot of people have similarly potential ideas cluttering up their heads. So let's dump them out and see what happens. Maybe a few years down the line we'll be able to say "yeah, that ___________ guy that made the ___________...I saw that same idea on this game forum back in the day."
Ive been saying for years to friends and relatives that I thought a couple new formats for movies could be an interactive setup where you could choose what happens on screen, or simultaneously released released versions of the same film but from the perspective of different characters. It looks like at least one of those is being experimented with.
 
I've been dreaming of a lot of games lately. Most aren't that revolutionary at all, like official Total War games for Lord of the Rings, the Renaissance, and The Elder Scrolls.

But there are two kinds of games in particular for which I have an itch that no game has yet scratched: Games based around tracking (as in following spoor) and games centered around mastering all the crafts and skills of wooden sailing ships and the infrastructure needed to build, use, and maintain them. I don't expect many people to find these interesting, which is probably why they've never been made, but I would.

The first is simple: you'd travel through the wilderness, hunting your quarry by searching for tracks, broken twigs, bits of hair, old campsites if they're people, etc. Of course, you could also become the hunted, and have to cover your own tracks.

I'd like this to be in a game set in Middle-Earth--say, Eriador just before the Nine arrived in pursuit of the Ring. As a Dúnedan Ranger, you'd have to patrol vast expanses looking for orcs, wolves, wargs, trolls, and who knows what else, keeping the Shire and the last remnants of your people safe. Tolkien's world wasn't supposed to be all about fighting, and so this game wouldn't be either. Combat would not be a constant, and would always be dangerous and meaningful. No solo-ing fifty orcs here. You'd have to learn the subtleties of nature, the alarm calls of birds, ways of surviving on your own in the elements. You could meet up with Elladan and Elrohir for some good orc-hunting, or other Rangers for bigger tasks, but Shadow of Mordor it is not. From time to time in the late game the Nine would appear at night, and you'd better learn how to hide! In the end you'd have to fight a delaying action against them at Sarn Ford.

The other game is more broad, and may well be two games, but I want a game where I can master woodworking, wood joining, rope walking, reading the tides, sounding depths, boarding actions, setting up lighthouses and buoys, and more. Start out as a lowly fisherman or carpenter's apprentice and work your way up to harbormaster, shipwright, or admiral. The game could work in any setting with sailing and rowing ships of war and trade--the Golden Age of Piracy, feudal Japan, ancient Greece, a fantasy setting, whatever. Ruling the sea takes a lot of effort and decisions but is a lot of fun.
 
I'd like this to be in a game set in Middle-Earth--say, Eriador just before the Nine arrived in pursuit of the Ring. As a Dúnedan Ranger, you'd have to patrol vast expanses looking for orcs, wolves, wargs, trolls, and who knows what else, keeping the Shire and the last remnants of your people safe.

This sounds very cool :goodjob: ... a little like one of my favorite games: Thief II, which calls itself a first-person sneaker. If you got into a fight, you'd usually lose. Erm...what do you do with the orcs, wolves, wargs, trolls, and who knows what else after you find them?

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I'd like to see a rip off of Avalon Hill's board game Freedom in the Galaxy, which was a rip off of Star Wars.

To avoid copyright problems, in my version, you could not play the Imperials, who'd now be a race of robots (controlled by an AI) and their attendant slave races. :whipped:

The driving forces of the rebels would remain their heroes, who may either individually lead military units or group together to go on missions. The board is a small galaxy of stars, each with planetary "rings." The rings show the name of the planet, the sapient race (if any), the strength of the planetary defense base, and the "environs" of the planet upon which the pieces can move. Outcome of the missions depend upon random card draws. The goal is to build up unrest until there's enough so that a rebellion will set off a cascade effect.
 
This sounds very cool :goodjob: ... a little like one of my favorite games: Thief II, which calls itself a first-person sneaker. If you got into a fight, you'd usually lose. Erm...what do you do with the orcs, wolves, wargs, trolls, and who knows what else after you find them?
Ambush, preferably with the help of other Rangers, I'd imagine. If you became a member of the Grey Company, you'd be a horse archer and would have a nice edge over melee enemies--just take care of the horse, and leave it a distance behind when sneaking!

I had ideas for other settings: American Old West, post-apocalyptic, and so on; the important thing to me is a game centered on understanding the wilderness and learning to read it to track down enemies and avoid being hunted.
 
I've just started getting the prompting to build a huge PnP RPG game aid. Do you know the Harn world supplements? It was basically a pretty fully-fleshed out background world in which the game master could set adventures. Well, my game aid would be like that but the world would be dynamic rather than just static. So, there would be like five or six different Sauron's-going-to-enslave-the-whole-world catastrophes brewing in the world. The GM could decide to which of them he or she wanted to give prominence, and the others would fall into a subordinate role (to keep gamers from purchasing the supplement and knowing how everything is going to develop). So these catastrophes build gradually, over a hundred years or so. Groups of players can play little parts of an evolving multi-generational storyline at a time. Then start up a new party for a set of adventures ten years down the line (meet their old, retired characters, now as NPCs).

By the way, are there good cartography programs on line? Half the fun of this project would be making the maps.
 
To OP: there's already Rocksmith.

I've wanted a game with 'raids' such as destiny or something similar, but it is heavily emphasized on clans or teams.

Each clan/team gets points. You get points just playing the game. PvP or even PvE. With your points, you can spend them on various items (armor, perks, weapons, whatever).

HOWEVER: Each clan/team/guild/whatever has a base of their own. There is a maximum number allowed of points/cash/gold/whatever you can spend to defend your base, although the maximum number itself is very high so there could still be a large discrepancy between a rich guild and a poor one.

If you successfully manage to raid another team's guild (you do this while they're not playing against you, the AI/turrets/etc are what defends your base) you get loot from the base. Other teams can also obviously loot your own base.

Players have the option of not joining any guild at all and just going 'mercenary' in which they work for contracts with one guild at a time in looting a base for them, but getting their fair share of the loot.
 
I had an idea for a AR experience but people think it's disrespectful.

I think it would be incredible to get on a boat at Pearl Harbor and put on glasses that overlay computer generated imagery. You'd ride the boat around the harbor and watch a re-creation of the attack as you go between the massive ships as they are under attack. There would be no interaction other that of course the overlay of the ships, planes and other computer generated imagery will shift naturally as your head moves about and the boat takes you around the harbor.

I think there could be a lot of other AR experiences from history that people would pay to see happen in the real world and perhaps have some limited interactions in some cases. Some of these experiences will be entirely fictional and purely narrative rather than informational.
 
I had an idea for a AR experience but people think it's disrespectful.

I think it would be incredible to get on a boat at Pearl Harbor and put on glasses that overlay computer generated imagery. You'd ride the boat around the harbor and watch a re-creation of the attack as you go between the massive ships as they are under attack. There would be no interaction other that of course the overlay of the ships, planes and other computer generated imagery will shift naturally as your head moves about and the boat takes you around the harbor.

I think there could be a lot of other AR experiences from history that people would pay to see happen in the real world and perhaps have some limited interactions in some cases. Some of these experiences will be entirely fictional and purely narrative rather than informational.

This would be neat, adds an extra dimension to historical spots, like stepping back into time with some real good AR, it only be disrespectful if done in a way that had no informational basis and went overboard with the 'theatrics' - should be more Das Boot and no Red October.
 
To OP: there's already Rocksmith.

Despite having not remembered the name, yeah, I know. The concept is using VR so that instead of teaching the guitar player to respond to a note trail that is kinda like playing space invaders with a guitar instead of a joystick you can actually learn how to play with a band. Not that Rocksmith isn't cool; it is, but VR offers more than just moving the 'guitar as video game controller' into a closed environment.
 
I had an idea for a AR experience but people think it's disrespectful.

I think it would be incredible to get on a boat at Pearl Harbor and put on glasses that overlay computer generated imagery. You'd ride the boat around the harbor and watch a re-creation of the attack as you go between the massive ships as they are under attack. There would be no interaction other that of course the overlay of the ships, planes and other computer generated imagery will shift naturally as your head moves about and the boat takes you around the harbor.

I think there could be a lot of other AR experiences from history that people would pay to see happen in the real world and perhaps have some limited interactions in some cases. Some of these experiences will be entirely fictional and purely narrative rather than informational.

I have to ask this, because I think it comes from two valid directions...why do you need a boat?

If you are generating the imagery anyway, it can be presented in your living room. More people are in their living room than are buying boat rides at Pearl.

From a programming standpoint I think accounting for the imprecision that is inherent in driving around in a boat is a pain in the butt, and in fact the imagery has to adapt depending on where you sit in the boat.

So if you just do the imagery full cloth and feed it through a standard computer or even play station VR rig you get to educate/entertain a lot more people.

That said, man, sign me up. MY gf is in about round six of convincing herself that she wants to turn the living room into a VR stadium (meaning a few more rounds and one day she will up and say "I want this and I want it like yesterday, make it happen"), and I'd be totally into taking VR tours of all kinds of places.
 
Yes, the whole point of VR/Holodeck is that you don't have to leave your living room to experience things. You can walk through the Forbidden City without flying to China.
 
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