Dragon is all around tougher but needs to eat more of what they produce instead of selling it, yeah, stuff like that would be great.
You might also get magical crops and the like! And be able to experiment with magical food/teas/whatever.
or devote fields to some plants vs. zomies bs that produces no useful yield but contributes directly to defense of your burgeoning town
Like, plants that shoot slime? Masses of thorns? Ooooh, you could add thorns to your tower defense thing, and whatever you're defending against will be massively slowed down and take damage as they go through the thorns! Of course, you'll have to add doors or some other way for people to exit and enter, especially if you wanted refugees of whatever the hell you're having to defend against to come into your town.
Ok, this is my ideal video game: Start with a base of Minecraft, which is a horrible sentence, but make the world way smaller- like 20k by 20k ish. Similar to Minecraft, you harvest resources, build stuff, ect. Hopefully you could model climates a bit better than minecraft does, but that's not the hill I wanna die on. There is increased character customization than minecraft, with clothing, hairstyles, accessories you can find in generated structures/craft once you have enough resources. There'd be farming too, with more choice and a bit more depth than minecraft (certain foods grow better in certain climates, ect) but not as punishing as a Harvest Moon- you don't need to worry about your crops dying. Eventually, once you have a little homestead going, other people wandering can come up and ask to join you. Each person has, like, 2 or 3 randomly generated personality traits that determine likes, dislikes, lines, ect, and each person has some jobs and such they'd like to do and some they really don't, and unless you get them to like you if you try and make them do anything they don't want to they'll take some of your stores and leave. Otherwise you can assign them jobs to bascially automate getting basic resources/equipment. I don't think there'd be a traitor/ someone joining for the express purpose of fucking shit up, at least on the base difficulty. To build your town you can either physically make more buildings or create blueprints to get builders to make certain designs (there would also be premade blueprints if you don't wanna bother.) There would be bandit attacks, no matter what- if you are solo it is easier to avoid them, but if they catch you you're fucked, while towns are bigger targets but rebound easier. Other possible features: -Pokemon like creature training, although less common, that you can either take with you (need some sort of item to get more companion slots) or leave to defend your home -an mcjobs like level up/points system -foxes. This is vitally important look I don't make the rules -Maybe having certain structures/natural features in your area would confer certain bonuses and/or minuses In general, it would be a fairly low stress exploration/town building game, that hopefully has enough to keep looking for/doing to stay fun
GRABBY HANDS like I'm reminded of those endless space free to play games where you gradually build up technology levels and buildings. I love those, EXCEPT. they always have the pvp multiplayer aspect which TOTALLY RUINS THE EXPERIENCE FOR ME i just want to development magic and/or space societies
You'd possibly have an endgame 'continue playing' option where, after getting to space/other planes of reality, you can research terraforming and start to build society in other planets/planes. That includes trying to find out if there's anything already living there, and trying to make peace with it if there was.
Thing I just thought up: RPG where you play as a geomancer, traveling from place to place to study the world. The general flow of the story would be a lot like Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky- for each section of the game, you're based in a particular region and exploring and getting to know it and following a plotline there, and once that part of the story is finished, you move on. However, the obligatory Enemy Difficulty Spike between chapters isn't because critters are conveniently arranged in power in the direction you're traveling, it's because your power grows as you connect to and commune with the land, and once you're off land you know, most of the powers you got before are weaker or inaccessible. Connection to each region is essentially a separate XP bar that goes up much faster than your geomancer level, and in each region the skills and specializations you have are different because different natural forces are more powerful and easier to tap into depending on where you are. Quests and sidequests also give you regional XP- aiding the residents of the land gains its favor, as does removing threats to it (those being the standard enemies).
Two games I crave: visual novel psychological horror mystery with multiple endings with elder gods as the theme. doable but not groundbreaking. A life sim dungeon crawler with romanceable characters, fully customizable player character/house, mini games for job classes like potion master, tailor or armor smith, a shop you can open to sell your goods and also customize a la Reccetear I don't know shit about making games but even I know this would be near impossible and yet, I dream
On the topic of the advancing a magical society game thing-some reagents are locked behind researches! So you'd have to research something and then make it to get that reagent. Like, if you want dragonscale, you need to make dragons. Also, there'd be many ways to unlock some things, with their own advantages and disadvantages. You could unlock the same thing multiple times if you were researching everything. There's no mutually exclusive thing-researches, and even society-type-researches aren't necessarily locked by what came before-your society can change socially as well as magically.
I wanted to inform this thread that I spaced out today and now have four and a half pages of brainstorming notes for that magical girl JRPG idea I posted near the beginning of this thread. Mostly about mechanical structure and gameplay flow because I am a sad, sad little nerd.
I'd really like to a see a game where you have life just beginning on a planet, and have to make a diverse, thriving ecosystem out of. But the only way you can add new species is through natural selections. Not like EVO or Spore where you just glue a new feature onto your creature when you need to. The feature has to be selected for. But the mechanics of that, and the win conditions, are really hazy in my mind. Also, a game where you start out with a small group of sapients and get them to discover technologies and expand all over the world. As this happens, they split into different groups who don't always get along, and fall out of contact with each other, and you can only control one person at a time, although you can switch control frequently, so shaping their history and making them do what you want them to do can be difficult. I wanted to see a colour based puzzle platformer where you could stand on coloured blocks and have different effects happen, take the colours out of one block and put it into another, and combine primary colours into secondary colours with different effects, but now I'm working on that, so I guess I've already seen it. (I think for my next game, I'm going to pay someone else to do the art, because this is taking forever) Another idea I'd like to make in the future is one I got from a dream where there was an RPG that was balanced around picking a fighter, a mage, and a thief, but none of those classes are actually available, so you have to play the game with the assorted gimmick classes that aren't very good at battling instead, and you had to exploit the game mechanics to get through. I eventually combined that with my fascination with substance manipulation, so all the gimmick classes are substance manipulators with varying levels of usefulness. (Pyrokinetic: Somewhat useful. Nutriokinetic: Less useful) I'm brainstorming it now when I feel like it, but I want to finish the first game before I start working on it properly.
I had a dream with an interesting game concept in it! It was a multiplayer game, but with several levels-the first few levels were singleplayer tutorial levels. There were three movement schemes: one for 2d areas, one for 3d areas with a nonflying character, and one for 3d areas with a flying character (although those last two were very similar-the main difference being some context-sensitive buttons to allow for aerobatics). The artstyle was kinda like Paranatural or a Nitrome game in the 2d areas, and more three-dimensional but still cartoony in the 3d areas. The first level was somewhat platformer-y, with the quirk that there were enemies who looked exactly like friendlies; you'd only tell because they'd start attacking you when you got too close or when you greeted them. Greeting people consisted of throwing them a friendliness pellet. No really it actually did look identical to Flowey's friendliness pellets and was even called that. If the character was someone you could talk to, they'd be undamaged. If they were a mindless hostile they'd be damaged. In the first level, that was your only attack. The enemies all look like weird shadow ghost things, and there's a mixture of normal humans* and friendly shadows. However, some of the normal humans will attack you if you get too close and don't greet them. They think that maybe you're a possessed human, as you can jump way higher than normal and "seem odd". Some shadows are actually currency-these don't react to friendliness pellets at all. Anything that you hit with a pellet who would've attacked you can give you a coin-humans will give you apology money if they attacked you, shadows will just drop money when dead. The money rapidly decays in value if you don't pick it up. You have to get up to the top left corner of the map, going back and forth in a rising zigzag pattern. On the upper right, you find a shadow that you can't reach that an NPC tells you is "harmless and mindless"-a currency shadow-but you can't actually reach it with jumping. There is, however, a flying boxy thing with a handle on a string hanging from it. You're expected to screw around trying to get the shadow until you figure out how to make the box rise (use key on the handle and hold down jump.) At top left there's a 'boss fight'-a very large hostile shadow that you have to fight to continue, on a box thing where you can climb it after getting it flying...but the shadow goes with you. (In the dream I managed to get it flying before beating the shadow and then couldn't jump over its attacks. This is presumably sequence-breaking and you're supposed to kill it first.) It's very easy for a boss fight-you have a lot of health and it doesn't deal much damage-but it's still harder than the 2 hit kills you've been doing. After beating that you have to fly the flying chunk of crushed building up to the very top left, where there's a door to the next level. On the way there's a lot of currency shadows, to provide motivation for learning to steer flying mounts or ships (which is what the building technically is). The steering was also similar to what a flying character apparently steered like. Then there's a 3d movement tutorial. In this one there's more obstacles, and it also shows where the 2d movement mode comes in-wherever there's a narrow enough area that having 2d movement makes sense, or in a few areas where your character has a plot-related reason to not move about much in the third dimension. Throughout this level, you learn about the context-sensitive, Mirror's Edge-esque parkour buttons. Also your character slowly becomes more shadow-y. Then you get to character customation. This is focused on customizing the character's biology-you can add limbs, change proportions, whatever. I made a facultive quadruped I think? Human-like but can also go on all fours for more speed, but that depletes the Stamina bar faster. Someone else had wings and was complaining that flying drained both their mana bar and their stamina bar so they couldn't fly very far and got told "yeah that's because you just got those wings and they're not very strong, as you level up and use them more they drain less points per second and you have more points". There were different quests you could get based on what class and general bodyplan you had. Some (sub)classes were only available to certain bodyplans and some bodyplans had compulsionary subclasses-so like, a multi-armed character would have the "many-armed" subclass as well as whatever other subclasses they picked unless they picked a different multiarmed-exclusive class, "flying" was added to any flier's class description unless they'd picked a different flyer-exclusive subclass, and so on. There were a lot of class- or subclass-exclusive quests-so my character couldn't access any quest that needed wings, but could access some quests the fliers couldn't. I only got to the low-level hub before being woken up. I don't know what the plotline was, beyond the early stuff. ETA: I do know, however, that many enemies could be talked down-the enemies that can't are the mindless shadowthings, which can still sometimes be captured or otherwise subdued. There may even be a class focused on diplomancy and capturing hostile shadows. *for some reason they all looked like a nonsketchy version of Technicality's avatar character in the art style of the game but they were supposed to be humans and later levels had normal humans so
a video game where you're a bowering dragon and must make a working society weaved in with a dungeon/challenge there's routes where the challenge includes figuring out that the thing even is a bower-example: a dungeon with puzzles to get in, and all the clues for the puzzles are in your worldwide pretzel stand chain but a more typical one would include a typical, puzzle-and-mindless-enemies-heavy RPG-ish dungeon, but with a working society in part or all of it you have to stop human* adventurers from killing all your minions while also providing suitable challenges for dragon adventurers occasionally it's possible for a human* adventurer to come off as a dragon adventurer in human* form and then awkward ensures if they somehow manage to beat the dungeon you can research various magical or technological things-if you want to lead an industrial revolution with added magic, you can most of the species are at war for various reasons also there were, originally, only a few sapients-dragons from a now-collapsed bubble universe, the Fae from a parasite universe, some kind of very variable species that's made of magic and can hybridize with pretty much anything with varying chances for a hybrid to come out as either a new species or one of the older species, humans, fire-people from the elemental plane of fire, floating winged people from the elemental plane of air, dwarves from the elemental plane of earth (not like traditional dwarves, but like...partially-rock, echolocating dwarves that actually eat some of the things they mine for), and fishfolk (not merfolk) from the elemental plane of water the hybridizing species then...well, hybridized so there's now like, centaurs and deerpeople and birdpeople and so on *or other non-draconic sapient
Anything from here. Particularly: Rugby (On The Moon Combat Simulator) and Virtual Command: Space Monkey Edition
So this is less of a concept dump and more of a "I wanna make this a reality" kind of thing. So, I'm a huge fan of the Fire Emblem series, and I want to basically make a Fire Emblem esque engine from the ground up in order to allow for a lot more flexibility and variety. I would attempt this myself but programming fucks with me a lot and I've tried learning it like 3 times but I can't get my head around it. However, I do have some interesting mechanic/level concepts that I might as well share! So, in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the game is split up into two different wars, with the descendants of the heroes from the first one fighting the second one. The heroes who get together have kids who have shared stat growths and skills from their parents. In other Fire Emblem games, you can forge your own weapons, altering stats and making a better overall weapon for a much higher price. My idea is that there would be two main generational sections, like in Genealogy, and near the end of the first half you receive a special ore with magical properties. You can use that ore to make Legendary Weapons, customized by the player. You'd be able to name them, give them specific stats, and all of them would never break. First part ends, you move to the second generation, and eventually you find the Legendary weapons again. This time, they are marked as "Legendary weapon used by (character who used it the most) in the previous war", and you get to use them again! They're weapons YOU have an attachment to, because you made them and personally created the stories around them. They might even get little extra bonuses depending on who used it the most. Like, if a Swordmaster used it(Swordmasters have high speed and crit chance, but less raw damage), then the weapon would increase your speed stat slightly when equipped. I have a ton of ideas similar to this, and I would love to make a game just chock full of stuff like that. If anyone who knows game coding well wants to help me out with something like this, please let me know, I think it'd be awesome.
