hello David Cage? it's me, amateur game designer

Post your video game concepts and ideas. Maybe a famous game designer will steal it

I had this idea: make a Hallmark Christmas movie game. Like an Until Dawn or Life Is Strange but really dial into that whole look. Low stress, low stakes plot. Just ultra chill and antiseptic looking like those movies. People just living in a pottery barn catalogue. I think it could reach a wide audience, and an annual holiday release schedule would be cool. I don't actually know how easy or hard it is to make a game.

i‘ve had this idea for one million years, but still think it’s a good one.

basically, playground games, but with big beautiful Fortnite-style (haha all you "that's an oxymoron" jokesters out there, pipe down) graphics and a variety of fun/exciting locales and a first-person perspective. think about it! you've got your tag, your freeze tag, your dodgeball, your manhunt, what have you. throw in good character designs and unlockable characters and gear, and you've got a good old time on your hands. no guns required (guns can gtfo, is what i think).

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@“whatsarobot”#p61886 playground games

100% this, Nintendo Land has a couple of games kind of like this, more specifically Mario Chase which is just manhunt and it's extremely fun (especially for kids) and it's just stuck there on the Wii U

I keep half-jokingly saying that I should just learn how to use unity, make a barebones Mario Chase clone, put it on steam and I'm sure it would sell a few tens of thousands of copies.

There's even a developer called playground games and they seem to think kids were making music festivals and had cars while playing in the playground. (That's a Forza horizon joke)

@“穴”#p61887

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There’s even a studio called playground games and they seem to think kids were making music festivals and had cars while playing in the playground.

i mean this sounds awesome, regardless.

please be the developer who gets rich off this idea! or at least breaks even!

i have long dreamed of an RPG with a Final Fantasy XII-like real-time battle system and Xenogears graphics: so you are running around polygonal battlefields and your dudes are converging on groups of enemies, and the camera is rotating around and regularly giving you that awesome sprite swap when it moves far enough for your perspective on the sprite to change

also this game would have a vaguely historical setting and badass music. will probably make it myself some day since it would be very easy to do so

This is a great idea for a thread. As someone with lots of (probably bad) ideas and little likelihood of ever using most of them, this is wonderful.

@"yeso"#p61868 One of my favorite film podcasts (it's called The Pink Smoke) fantasized about a AAA open-world game based on _Meet Me In St. Louis_ where you would go around having cute conversations in Technicolor scenarios and you'd load up on items like "a fancy button" or "an ornate bit of string."

I've often thought it would be cool to have a fighting game that has ways for you to totally disable certain attacks/types of attacks/other inputs for your opponent.

-Maybe make it something that happens at the beginning of the match, like each player gets to ban one thing for BOTH players (so I choose to ban dashing and you choose to ban light attacks, so now that's how we're fighting)
-Maybe make it part of the fight: you have to land certain attacks to disable certain moves for your opponent*
-Maybe tie it into the aesthetic, like the characters are cyborgs and you can rip off their limbs/weapons/components to indicate an option-loss
-Obviously, balancing this game would be a nightmare, but I think there might be ways. I just think it would keep the metagame fresh...to get good at the game, you could never rely on any one optimal playstyle. You would have to be ready to play your character in a wide variety of unusual ways in any given match in order to win. I love weird, gimmicky, awkward playstyles in fighting games, so maybe this is just my dream of making that happen more regularly.

*To be fair, some games sort of already did this (Samurai Showdown series when you disarm your opponent they lose moves and Time Killers where you can tear off limbs), but there's just so much more to explore here.

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@“rearnakedwindow”#p61891 AAA open-world game based on Meet Me In St. Louis

that would rock

not open world though. But it would have steambot chronicles music minigame for ding ding ding goes the trolley

@“whatsarobot”#p61886 there are a bunch of roblox games similar to what you describe that take place in various playgroundy environments, e.g. ball pits and mcdonalds play place tube mazes. of course, only the most iconoclastic of insert credit forum posters would ever argue these are “beautiful.”

my half baked idea is a two player dating sim where each person designs/trains love interests for the other person to pursue. i suppose the target audience would be couples, especially those in long distance relationships who can’t actually be together physically. i’m imagining something asynchronous, since that works better if the players are in different timezones. half of the game would be a single player experience where you “train” your character, maybe answer a bunch of personality quiz questions, engage in certain challenges, decide stats to boost, and write free form text responses to certain prompts. the other half would be guiding your character through dates with the other person’s character. maybe you get asked a question and if you pick an answer your partner marked as bad their character starts to hate your character a little bit. maybe your character says weird stuff out of context based on a prompt you answered 6 months ago and forgot about. that sort of thing.

…actually this sounds a lot like tomodachi life, but as a dating sim. the idea is that your characters aren’t necessarily you. they have a life of their own, but that life feels in some way derived from your personality, so when you and your partner’s character go on dates together, you feel like you are exploring some corner of their mental world that you wouldn’t get access to otherwise. and perhaps more importantly, it would give you both another thing to talk about. the areas could all be various degrees of quirky with interesting npcs that your two characters interact with. it might be fun to talk about how, say, your partner’s character got in a fight with the hairdresser, who in response stabbed them in the eye with a pair of scissors, and now their character has to wear an eyepatch. stuff like that.

I have long wanted to basically remake the old SSI Gold Box engine as a “modern” hybrid RPG with first person dungeon exploration and world interaction ala Grimrock and the like and strategic turn-based combat on a square grid. The combat would have to be more accessible than SRPG-style battles because it would need to be robust enough to support random encounters. If they could do it well in the late 80s it can be done today.

Similar lines but a 45-90 minute roguelike Wizardry clone. Pick your party of 6 at the start and go through random dungeons with them, if any of them die, they die. Basically Darkest Dungeon but much shorter and less grimdark

I really like the feeling you get when free falling in Luftrausers and you're just able to save yourself from crashing into the water. I am sure this exists but I have thought it would be cool to make a 3D Luftrausers-style game that replicates that feeling.

My joke answer was simply "Dark Souls with cars," but there's not really anything there, oops.

I want Stardew Valley, but the setting is a no/low conflict post-apocalypse.

There's probably dozens of survival games kind of like this, but danger is such a big part of those. This game would be chill, resources are somewhat abundant and there is little to no competition. But there's no services or government or whatever, so your days are filled mostly by chores.

It's a long time since I watched The Walking Dead, but I remember when one season started, they were living in an old prison, growing crops, being relatively chill. I want that vibe, but there's no zombies or bad guys to ruin it.

I have this idea for a tactics RPG where you and your friends are defending the squat you live in from cops trying to evict you. You have to use the environment a lot to create advantages, because one-on-one, the pigs have better training and gear than you and your punk friends. I haven't developed this idea at all, but I would love to see a tactics RPG with a militant anarchist bent to it (in a good way), rather than the usual fantasy medieval political drama we usually get.

Wildermyth uses the environment in a tactics setting in some cool ways, and I think this game mechanic can be expanded on. And I like the idea of having much much more limited resources than the cops, so being forced to use what you have in clever ways. Like, yeah you've got a shotgun, but you also only have two shells. So take out as many as possible with what you have.

It'd require some really good level design, like... modern Hitman level of thoroughness and detail. And that's after thinking through all the actual battle mechanics and whatnot.

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@“yeso”#p61868 make a Hallmark Christmas movie game

i like the idea of a xmas fmv game where you have to guide different households from xmas morning to a big gathering in the afternoon.

Persona but with grown ups. Atlus, my DMs are open

@“goonbag”#p62093 great idea, but could we do this without Atlus' involvement? i prefer my adults without creep and homophobic tendencies.

…and yet, what about Persona, but with the cast of Seinfeld? @goonbag's DMs are open

@yeso Being you the person responsible I need to ask, is the typo on the title intentional? I want it to be intentional.

@“whatsarobot”#p62097 On second thought… what about Persona without Persona