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I read an idea a long while back that I’ll repeat:
A spy game in the style of Splinter Cell, except you aren’t the guy, you’re his handler. You tell him “crawl under that laser,” or “wait a moment, there’s a guard… okay now go!” or “input the following sequence to disable the doomsday device,” and he more or less listens to what you tell him to do. The issue is that the more you fuck up and get him hurt or killed, the less likely he is to listen to you. So you have to build up a relationship with your spy by giving him good instructions in a timely fashion and getting him to complete missions successfully. Over the course of the game, as you progress, you’d be able to tell him to do more dangerous things because he’d trust you more. Playing the game successfully would make you feel like you and your spy were a well-oiled machine, working together to take down supervillains and criminal syndicates.
Even more interesting… Imagine a 2 player co-op game. The “spy” player is playing a tactical fps, but has no minimap or enemy detection. The “handler” player is patched into all the security cameras and tells the spy where to go and where the enemies are.
Simulator Game Simulator where you play a guy playing a simulator game and have to make sure he doesn’t forget to sleep or get fired but manages to successfully plow that virtual field every time.
Excavation Simulator.
Just put all resources into simulating dirt well, then make a game about driving various power equipment. A sandbox game, where you just build whatever you want. VR would be fun.
Actually, I was recently thinking of gravel pit simulator. It’s be like a farming sim, you’d buy various equipment and use them to move dirt separating gravel and selling it to get money to buy better requirements.
That’s be great. It would be especially cool if you could simulate gravel, with all its friction and inertia and everything. And then somehow make that same model handle everything down to the molecular sheets of clay.
I bet that model would be mind expanding to build
In college I made a game called Freefall Simulator. The idea was to make a game with the goal of making the player motion sick, as if they were falling.
It worked, a little too well.
I had to play it for hours on end.
You were ahead of your time. Turns out, motion sickness simulations became so popular, that companies started building hardware specifically for it.
I’ve thought about how fun and nauseating it would be on VR, NGL
Sounds like Mirror’s Edge (I loved it but every time I played it I felt sick lol)
I absolutely loved the original, the falling mechanism definitely inspired it
Unionization simulator. Talk to coworkers, see who is supportive. Risk revealing too much to soon to someone who runs to the bosses.
Also strike simulator as a sequel.
Revolution simulator for the trilogy.
I just want a life sim with reasonably believable NPCs. Dwarf Fortress is the only game I’ve seen really attempt something like this, where NPCs act intelligently, and you can ask them about topics and events dynamically.
Essentially, I want a game where the NPCs are capable of doing everything the player can, so I could start a shop and give out quests myself, if I want.
I’ve actually been “working” on a project like this. It’s a huge undertaking, but who knows, maybe I’ll get there one day.
On a similar note, middle management simulator
It better have a middle management manager sitting at their desk playing the middle management simulator.
I wonder if AI’s like ChatGTP make this more achievable
I’ve definitely thought a lot about that. I think it definitely does, but I also think there’s a lot of unfulfilled potential left in more “traditional” AI.
There are pros and cons to the GPT approach, with down-sides such as the (current) limit on the context, and difficulty establishing consistent “facts”. These are generally outweighed by the obvious up-sides, but a GPT-based AI will feel different than a more hard-coded one.
All this to say: There will be a hundred better GPT-based games released before I can ever hope to release my project.
Yes… But actually no.
ChatGPT is amazing for generating reasonable-sounding prose. That means you can have an NPC say things that largely make sense… If you know what they need to say.
For instance, let’s say you ask an NPC for directions to the mayor’s house. In this scenario, you need your NPC to
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Parse and understand the player’s speech. (This is a question. The question is about reaching a location. The location is the mayor’s house.)
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Modeling the NPC’s knowledge. (Does this NPC know where the mayor lives? Do they know someone else who does?)
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Disambiguating conversation. (Do we have a mayor? Are they asking about our mayor, or - from context- someone in a different town?)
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Constructing an answer. (Left, right, right, straight…)
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Converting the answer to a conversational tone. (Well, if ya’ head south down wewhauken, turn right on glottis st…)
Chat GPT solves #5 for sure. But 1-4 are…iffy. Sometimes, you can give Chat GPT a list of factoids and it’ll reply with the data you gave it. Other times it’ll “hallucinate” an answer, especially if a player asks something you didn’t expect. (And people will definitely come up with stuff you don’t expect.)
Still, LLMs do solve a really hard piece of the dynamic-NPC puzzle. I’m sure we’ll see them in use. It’s just not necessarily even the hardest part of this problem.
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Oh, also: the way I’m writing my project, I’m intentionally making the AI modular, so I can “slot in” something like ChatGPT and play around with that.
I’ve had this one in my head because I genuinely thought it existed.
Tank Crew Simulator. It’s like Fury where you’re in a little tank with three other guys. Your view of the world is through a tiny slit in the metal or if you decide you want to risk getting your head blown off, you can open your hatch. If you’re the loader, make sure the main gun operator has a round loaded into the cannon. If you’re driving, don’t be that guy who runs over an anti-tank mine. As the gunner, it’s your duty to keep your head connected to your shoulders.
It would actually make a good VR game you could play sitting in a chair
I’ve wanted to create a game that’s a simulation of mental health issues. For instance, youre playing someone who has autism. You turn to walk down a street. Turn to look, touch, car crash horns, screaming. Touch a wall, textures explode, patterns etching into your outstretched arm. Or, one about ptsd. Another about auditory processing disorder.
My IRL reality can be so hypervivid, intense, super saturated, surreal. Often wish someone else could experience it, know what it’s like.
Senuas sacrifice is that specifically about schizophrenia I believe
You are a super intelligent sentient AI, the last remnant of an alien warship that fought in a losing battle. Your creators were wiped out by a ruthless enemy, and you barely managed to escape. You jumped blindly to another galaxy, hoping to find a safe haven. But fate was cruel, and you crashed on a barren world. Your ship is beyond salvage, but you survived the ordeal. It’s time to rebuild!
You are basically an immobile mainframe, but you do have a few robots and lots of nanobots under your control. You command a few of them to scout the environment and look for resources. You start harvesting them, and before long, you have a new robot factory. You expand your sphere of influence, build some infrastructure and explore your new home.
The idea is to build systems that build more systems. First, you’ll focus on doing low level stuff manually, but soon you’ll automate that. Then you’ll act as s manager of your robots for a while, before you can fully automate management. Then you’ll act as a CEO sort of figure for your bot factory, but eventually you’ll automate that too. Then you’ll command more and more resource extraction facilities and factories built, and then even that sort of expansion strategy gets automated. It’s just building nested automation all the way. Eventually, you’ll command a vast robot empire spanning several planets and perhaps even the whole galaxy. Hmm, I wonder if galactic conquest could be automated too…
that sounds great. abstractivus, the machine overlord.
I read not long ago, when looking at some theories of why we haven’t found alien life yet and the Great Filter, something hypothesizing that ingelligent organic life might not be the “end state” in its own right, but rather the egg that hatches a new AI.
In your game, it could be interesting encountering AIs created by different species, where the organic species no longer exist but the AIs they gave “birth” to did. I imagine there might be ways in which they are very different (in how they act/what they do) than a human-created AI.
Initially, the sentient machines would be like their designers. Once the machines are allowed to develop organically for several generations, they should be able to find their own way of doing things. For instance, in Matrix we saw machines that were thoroughly alien, because they were designed by machines.
Many generations later, these machines might encounter machine descendants of another long lost biological empire. Would they be vastly different, or would they converge on the one obvious way of making sentient machines? Who knows. Galaxies and orbits tend to be disk shaped, because that’s the obvious stable configuration things gravitate towards. Maybe intelligence and sentience has to follow a similar force of nature, and therefore, convergences on just one successful configuration.
The one I’ve had in my head for a while is a “Factory” simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you’d actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.
There’s a game called Automation that covers some of these aspects.
Definitely don’t play eve online
I’m a kitchen designer and use an app called 2020 design to do cabinet layouts.
Thing is, we’ve got 3D models of every single cabinet we sell, plus a lot of name brand appliances.
It would be fun, for this factory game, to use real machinery from real companies. It would be a pretty massive undertaking to simulate all those machines, but existing CAD models could be a start.
I imagine there’d be IP stuff to worry about. Like, you and me probably think it’s just a box with a door on it, but the company that designed it sure won’t…
But I’ve thought myself that if you mashed up CAD files for various widgets with a UI made by a good game designer, you could have some extraordinarily useful business apps that are a hundred percent better than what’s usually on the market. I can think of multiple games with base-building in them that are easier to use than business apps that honestly do very similar things.
I have to imagine there’s probably some market forces at work that prevent this from happening.
One thing I sorely want in 2020 is the ability to navigate the space using regular game controls. WASD plus mouse to look.
Instead you use roughly the same controls you would to navigate the source CAD plans and elevations, to navigate the 3D rendered space.
Global Eden
Objective: plant the 🌎🌍 globe
Where (in simulation?) You can build nurseries, build drones to send plants to your local surroundings, link up with other druids across the Earth, collect & add reports on mycelium, bacterial & insect cohabitations, explore the woodwidewebs, develop food & energy generation, waste remediation for all buildings (every plot of land on the planet shall (should) contribute to global wealth). Restore & progress balance of life from this dismal current dystopian quest for blood oil steel and waste. Make this planet a better vacation spot than Risa in the closest 1000 galaxies. A happy Ent-friendly planet.
Understanding local Flora & fungii for food, dress, & medication (open source libraries & communities at every forest!)
I love to see more use of tech towards global wealth & unity. Good air & water, good food, good communities, great forests, good travels… These are elements of global wealth. Money and marketing have dwindling use & tax us of great creativity (another lovely element of global wealth) and energies. Building & sharing abilities are priceless.
Gratitude & celebration daily.
There have been a few games where the goal was to make a planet/region habitable again, I’ve always liked the idea. It’s like a reverse city builder.
Pet-sim, for VR.
God simulator.
Create a world affect it’s geological development, evolution of creatures, rise and fall of different religions, reward and punish through blessings or plagues, rise and fall of different civilizations and watch holy wars develop.
Check out a small indie game called world box. Also there is Black and White 1&2, but those are fairly old at this point.
So Populous.
Edit: sorta
That’s just being a dungeon master
Star trek sim. Like bridgecrew but better. Larger crews including a medical and engineering and security.
Faster than light is close, but not really a sim perse
Giant alien spiders are no joke!
There are a few indie games like this. Artemis is the first to come to mind but it’s old, primitive, and clunky to play. Empty Epsilon is a free open-source spiritual successor that’s supposed to be better, but I haven’t played it.
Stationeers is vaguely that sort of thing, but more focused on maintaining a space station than exploring.
This isn’t so much a sim thing, but I would love to have a spaceship game that was like Sea of Thieves.
Honestly, Deep Rock Galactic could be that if it had more of a world to explore
I was talking about this just the other day as a joke.
I would make “Car Simulator.” It would simulate driving and working on a car exceptionally well. But the game itself would be basically Grand Theft Auto, just with much more realistic car control, modification and physics.
Another, serious idea, I’ve been kicking around a while but am unsure how to actually do it is a game that captures the insanity of solving fictional problems with fictional solutions on Star Trek. Like a nebula is sapping energy from your ship, so you reconfigure the deflector to emit a neutron pulse or something. It would simulate science itself and create random elements and physics that the player would have to learn, understand, and can exploit. The key is that it’s always new and different forcing every player, every new game to be creative in coming up with solutions to the random problem with equally random tools to promote critical thinking skills. I’m just not sure how to gamify “the scientific method” itself or I’d be actively working on making this a reality.
