New concepts in games

A common present may be for loved ones to have themselves professionally recorded for AR/VR reconstructions to give to loved ones.
Holograms of me telling my wife and kids how to live their lives and clean the bathroom!!
 
I think more lasers !!! :D

But more seriously I was thinking about MMO simultaneus strategy&battle simulator where some people are leaders/commanders , planning movements , building bases etc. on the RTS layer and the rest of the players are playing roles of combatants/pilots. In other words some people are giving orders and You must complete missions based on them. Upon succesful completion You can advanve in ranks and become a commander yoursefl. What do You guys think ?
 
Reminded me of the Black Mirror episode "Be right back"... :scared: creepy stuff...
I was reminded of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica spinoff. In that, a fully-realized doppleganger of a dead character was created using the vast array of digital "footprints" she'd left behind. The idea was that there was so much data available in the form of social media posts, selfies, videos, online purchases, web searches, etc, that a sufficiently sophisticated analytical program could crunch all of it and produce a believable reproduction of the person.
 
I've been trying to make a 3D SimTower for a decade but I never got very good at coding.

SimTower was made for DOS (and had a sequel) and was rather simple: build rooms to earn. money, build and manage elevators (and stairs and escalators) to get people to the rooms. If stress builds up too much (mainly impacted by the speed of transportation and rent price), tenants move out.

Making it 3D would add hallways to the equation (since it makes no sense to cut through your neighbor's apartment). My other novel ideas were sustainability (trying to minimize outside routes, including commutes, restocking, and trash) and the ability to design the tower in several styles (Art Deco, International, Modernist/Brutalist, Pagoda/Chinese Traditional/Legend of Korra-inspired) in an alternate history Shanghai (where Russia stayed out of The Great War, thus preventing the rise of communism).
 
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Phrossack said:
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 love this idea. Would definitely spend $50 on it. Not sure if it was Sid Meier's Pirates, but there was a pirate game in the late 1990s that had a pretty solid career path in it. You had to pillage smaller ships to gain loot that you then used in ports to solidify a bit of a personal crime empire. Obviously that's the macro view of what you're talking about.

As a woodworker I can appreciate how profound the accumulated knowledge of shipbuilding had become by the time iron plate and steam rolled around. You had people who knew how to harvest trees from specific microclimates in order to ensure the desired engineering properties of the wood. You had clockmakers who would fashion gears from laminates of different species harvested at different seasons of the year to reduce moisture movement. Almost all that knowledge is now gone, it disappeared in a remarkably short period of time. Some of it remains in the wooden boat restoration community, and among luthiers.

in any case, I really like this idea.
 
Maxis really never did a plant simulator? They did an ant one. It doesn't seem that new of a concept though, there are a lot of games where you pick similar stuff, like there's a dna mixing game to evolve a species on steam, I can't recall the name. Then there's plague inc where you evolve a plague. I feel a plant simulator is too similar, though the simplicity of it might be cool.

Game concepts don't matter as much as execution. Like you just want someone to execute this concept well with polished graphics or whatever. It's like how everyone keeps saying civilization is amazing, if it only had a better AI. AI in a 4x game is not a new concept by any stretch, but still no one's done it right yet.

I have a really awesome example of the game Darkest Dungeon. If you've played it, it's a turn based dungeon crawler. There's nothing super sophisticated about it, in fact I think it needs some mods to make it really shine as some of the systems are really rudimentary and before the last major update patch certain mechanics were completely broken and exploitable. Like I'm very sure we on this forum could design a lot of features to make the game play better, but what they did that makes the game so awesome is the art style and atmosphere of it. The mechanics kind of shallow but the execution of the game is outstanding and makes it really fun.

Me personally I've had an idea that if I was ever rich enough to start my own game dev studio I would do this. You know the star wars rebellion and empire at war games? They have like a galaxy wide resource management game where you have planets and build stuff on them, then they have space combat and ground combat.

My idea is to take this to a much more extreme level within the mechwarrior universe. I loved the mechcommander games and mechwarrior 4 and mercs. My idea would be you have a whole planetary strategy layer but with not too many planets so each planet can have a dozen or so areas of interest. On those areas you can build stuff, factories, defenses, civilian population centers, farms, whatever, very 4x like in the vein of master of orion.

Then from those planets you build mech armies to deploy. You can design them however you like and research new techs and stuff. When you deploy them to enemy places you are thrown into a strategic rts game like mechcommader. You can move the mechs around like a general on the battlefield but you also have the option to pilot the mech yourself and now it's a mechwarrior game where you pilot the mech in first or 3rd person. You can still issue commands but you lose the grand strategy layer, but now you can directly impact the outcome of a battle. Like maybe you're a much better fighter than your AI pilot, so you send a couple mechs into a huge disadvantage which you can overcome by playing lights out on one of them personally.


I also wish someone would modernize lords of the realm 2, add a few new concepts to it but keep the core game intact. It was just so good. And we need a proper modern day castle building game like stronghold. All the sequels to it suck and everything with building now it's a minecraft clone, not close to the same flavor.


There was this freeware game installed on my schools pcs decades back that was text based. It kind of circulated the computer labs like an urban legend but it was there. It was some kind of drug lord economy game where you would travel to cities, buy drugs there and travel somewhere else to resell them for more money. Like city A might have cocaine for cheap but a demand for heroin and city B vice versa so you'd trade between them. Very simplistic, could've been any merchandise really, but in this it was drugs which I think made it appealing to us. And you could buy weapons and get caught by the cops and stuff. But I think a simulation economy game about building a drug empire would be pretty cool. I know there's like a mafia type game like this, an older one I think, but we could use a new one that's specific about making a cartel or something. You could pick your country to operate out of, each with advantages and disadvantages, and try to rule through cooperation with other elements or be ruthless and take them all out, hire operatives or keep it all in the family.


Oh and games aside, my million dollar idea is to make infant carrier car seats that have wheels that pop out of the bottom and handles that extend so you can wheel your kids around like luggage. There are tons of strollers or other attachments to do this but I don't think there's an infant carrier that has it built in like luggage does with extending handles. Cus when my kids were in those there were so many times I didn't want to lug a stroller somewhere but then when we got to the store or whatever they were asleep and I didn't want to get them out of the carrier and it's too heavy and bulky to carry around for long.
 
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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 remember seeing a video of a VR game where the player is trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11. I really don't remember much about it, though, other than the smoke outside the window looking rather ridiculous.
 
I love this idea. Would definitely spend $50 on it. Not sure if it was Sid Meier's Pirates, but there was a pirate game in the late 1990s that had a pretty solid career path in it. You had to pillage smaller ships to gain loot that you then used in ports to solidify a bit of a personal crime empire. Obviously that's the macro view of what you're talking about.

As a woodworker I can appreciate how profound the accumulated knowledge of shipbuilding had become by the time iron plate and steam rolled around. You had people who knew how to harvest trees from specific microclimates in order to ensure the desired engineering properties of the wood. You had clockmakers who would fashion gears from laminates of different species harvested at different seasons of the year to reduce moisture movement. Almost all that knowledge is now gone, it disappeared in a remarkably short period of time. Some of it remains in the wooden boat restoration community, and among luthiers.

in any case, I really like this idea.
There were two games I remember playing as a kid that had a lot of this going on... One was, as you mentioned, "Pirates!", which eventually became Pirates:Gold, then Sid Meier's Pirates... Pretty much the same game but with progressively better graphics.

The other game was Uncharted Waters... now that was truly a gem. It allowed you to quite literally sail the entire globe, from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Okinawa to Antarctica and everything in between, all while fighting Pirates, establishing trade routes, investing in ports to make them carry more goods and expand their offerings. You could turn a crappy port into a good one if you invested enough into it. As a side effect the ports would become more loyal to your Monarch, who would in turn reward you with greater lands and titles.

And it was really immersive... the world felt so BIG... it took a long time to sail from country to country, you had to manage food, water, sailor's morale, ship wear and tear etc... the music changed depending on your latitude and it took forever to cross the ocean... and you could only do it if you had certain kinds of ships... which brings me to the shipbuilding aspect...

It truly was a joy to build ships in this game. You could build an entire fleet, and there were so many choices of ships, from fluyts to caravels to Galleons and other kinds in between. You could choose multiple kinds of cannon with different abilities, you could customize the amount of crew space versus cargo space to build warships, merchant vessels, and hybrids. You could even pick between multiple different kinds of wood with stronger wood being more expensive. They even let you customize the masthead and name the ships in your fleet. Then you could recruit captains to sail the ships in your fleet for you. What a great game. :D
 
Btw, by now there a few free game building programs around, so you can try making your own games :) eg i already have two free adventure games (though it is too much work for me and thus the result wasnt good :) )

For 2d there is ags, and for 3d there is unity and godot.
 
I love this idea. Would definitely spend $50 on it. Not sure if it was Sid Meier's Pirates, but there was a pirate game in the late 1990s that had a pretty solid career path in it. You had to pillage smaller ships to gain loot that you then used in ports to solidify a bit of a personal crime empire. Obviously that's the macro view of what you're talking about.

As a woodworker I can appreciate how profound the accumulated knowledge of shipbuilding had become by the time iron plate and steam rolled around. You had people who knew how to harvest trees from specific microclimates in order to ensure the desired engineering properties of the wood. You had clockmakers who would fashion gears from laminates of different species harvested at different seasons of the year to reduce moisture movement. Almost all that knowledge is now gone, it disappeared in a remarkably short period of time. Some of it remains in the wooden boat restoration community, and among luthiers.

in any case, I really like this idea.
Thanks, it's become a dream of mine!

If you're ever in Europe, I highly recommend the maritime museums in Paris and Hamburg. They have a staggering amount of models there and some information on the shipbuilding process.

Just think of a game in which you'd manually construct a ship--select and cut the wood, walk the rope, dab the cotton or hemp in tar for oakum caulk, and so on. Better yet, get an assembly line like the Nuovo Arsenale going. I like the image of setting up the assembly offline, but I *love* the idea of human players in an MMORPG working together to wright an entire ship.

I was daydreaming today about all the work of developing a great port in premodern times: explore an unsettled area or a neglected fishing village, sound depths, map and time winds and currents, start with some basic piers, and keep adding things in the right places: sea walls, lighthouses, wharves, warehouses, housing, cranes. Eventually you'd need to set up a dredging service, and have a harbormaster oversee all of this, though that's probably you.

If you have the time, labor, space, and money, you could set up separate walled harbors for warships and merchant ships, and subdivide the merchant docks into scheduled and unscheduled arrivals. This would be good for security but would cost you. On top of that you may want room for the fishing fleet, dredging fleet, tugs, and maybe even buoy maintenance boats and harbor police.

You could schedule regular deliveries from given suppliers for things like lumber, tar, rope, military equipment, food, and drink and reserve harbor space for them, though if it's unused until they arrive, that's an opportunity cost, and if it's used, you'll have to get the people docked there to clear out and not keep the scheduled visitors waiting.

At a certain point a harbormaster is really a mayor of the sea, and that brings all kinds of work and opportunities. And that's not counting all the military defense and naval raiding and campaigns!

It's odd that I've taken to the sea like this. I'm a lifelong landlocked landlubber and occasional river-farer, and I regard the open ocean with more than a little fear, but it's just too fascinating.

@Sommerswerd that sounds like a lot of fun! I'll need to be on the lookout for games like those.
 
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Btw, by now there a few free game building programs around, so you can try making your own games :) eg i already have two free adventure games (though it is too much work for me and thus the result wasnt good :) )

For 2d there is ags, and for 3d there is unity and godot.
Most 3d engines can be used to make 2d games too. Unity is probably the most popular and well documented with Godot in the rise now. I was playing with Unity and Unreal Engine for some time and there are tools for making 2d games with Unreal too. Hell, even CryEngine can be used to make 2d games but it would be a bit of an overshot.

BTW, what did you use for your adventures?
 
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Most 3d engines can be used to make 2d games too. Unity is probably the most popular and well documented with Godot in the rise now. I was playing with Unity and Unreal Engine for some time and there are tools for making 2d games with Unreal too. Hell, even CryEngine can be used to make 2d games but it would be a bit of an overshot.

BTW, what did you use for your adventures?
The ancient but entirely free adventure game studio (ags) ;)
 
I'd never heard that word before today, and that's the second time I've seen it. The other was an interview with Tom Morello. Is this a "Nelson Mandela syndrome" thing, or am I just an idiot?

Not an idiot nor unduly ignorant. It's a fairly specialized and technical term, right? Is the Nelson Mandela syndrome thing the same as the syndrome with a German name? It's totally escaping me right now.. Bader Meinhopf or something?
 
Not an idiot nor unduly ignorant. It's a fairly specialized and technical term, right? Is the Nelson Mandela syndrome thing the same as the syndrome with a German name? It's totally escaping me right now.. Bader Meinhopf or something?
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon--you learn a new term and start encountering it everywhere.
 
I want an RTS with intelligent subordinate officers you can delegate tasks to.
 
I want an RTS with intelligent subordinate officers you can delegate tasks to.
I've wondered for years whether an RTS with more-realistic-than-usual (not to say completely realistic) command & control and battlefield awareness systems would be fun to play and not just frustrating. Several games have had some sort of morale system, although those still had "God view" of the battlefield, and your units always received, understood, and implemented your orders to the best of their ability. Communication between the commander and subordinate units is always flawless, the player can always see whatever your units can see, etc. Games that want to limit battlefield awareness will often implement a jarringly artificial "view range" system. In World of Tanks (not an RTS, but some similarities) you can't see enemy vehicles sitting in the middle of a flat field on a bright sunny day if they're a meter beyond your crew's view distance; but then those same enemies will magically spring into existence if one of your teammates either gets closer or has a better view range than you do (to the game's credit, you can shoot enemies you can't see - you can fire blindly into a spot you suspect an enemy is hiding, and if he's there, you'll hit him).
 
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