next »

[Sir Raptor]

In the future, all wars are fought with chaos theory. Arrange your butterflies strategically to rain destruction down on your rival nations.

[disparat]

Procedurally generated, horror-themed twin stick shooter/open-world metroidvania, taking place in an enormous, rotting derelict of a city. General mood is sort of grim fantasy, similar to Dark Souls, with lots of religious imagery and Giger-style body horror. You wield a rapidly-firing mechanical crossbow instead of a gun, the typical armament for twin stick games.

Imagine wandering through an open-world labyrinth, besieged by demons and automatons alike, while flocks of dead peasants cascade out of open mausoleums towards you. Desperately holding back waves of eyes and hands while balancing on a sea of muscle tissue, rippling in the city's river, before a building collapses and reveals a regal set of jaws sitting atop a fungal mass. Marching around an open landfill, glancing around to see where the filth undulates before an immense worm leaps up and riddles the air with its leathery body. Hot damn.

[ThePortalGuru]

Sounds like something Visceral Games would make.

Subway Game
Player is told to go into a subway and press the action button.  Player character pulls out a gun and blows his brains out upon pressing the action button.  Game crashes.  When reopened, the player character is in a dark, abandoned version of the same subway and a pale girl climbs up from the player's taskbar and drags herself into the game window.

Long story short, your character's in the spirit realm, and is beset by crushing loneliness.  But when he kills himself, he can switch between realms.  So he decides to go back into the physical world to get some friends.

[disparat]

You are a demonic entity of pure evil, an incorporeal being whose very presence twists the world towards hate, sorrow, and madness. Created in the foul pits deep within the abyss of Hell, you have no ability to do anything with your existence besides possess people and watch from their eyes as their very psyche falls apart.

But you're a pacifist.

Still, you are forced onto Earth. As a a faulty possessor with no intention of hurting anybody, you are unable to not inhabit people, but you can jump to anyone in your presence immediately. The gameplay revolves around making decisions on when to leave people. The story will branch off and behaviors will change just by your movements, so you must figure out how to minimize violence in the most intelligent way.

The game itself is basically a visual novel with a focus on the characters and story, which branches slightly for almost every moment you can make a change. You are incarnated on Earth in a smallish town in a high school, and you can make your way blindly towards anyone who comes near you. As a demon, there are some rules about how possession works - the most important being that if someone goes to sleep, you will be forced out of their body and into the nearest person's. If your character is awake, but in the presence of sleeping people, they will be physically unable to sleep - quickly leading to stress and awful results (unless they leave the sleeping people, in which case they are free to sleep themselves). If everyone, awake or asleep, is outside of your normal range of possession and your character falls asleep, you win the game - you can make your way off Earth and desert Hell, going AWOL into some unknown dimension.

From your starting point in the basement of a high school, dash lightly through the town, keep everyone alive until nightfall, and find someone who will go to bed alone. If you play well enough, you can make it through having done some good deeds! Play unfortunately and you'll leave a wake of blood and misery across an entire town, or worse.

As time goes on, the pressure builds. It seems that there's an enormous party being held that many of the high school kids are going to; a lonely sleep won't be found among them - but can you make it to someone who isn't going? You can't just find them early on and stay in them; they'll do something drastic. In fact, the entire party is bad news; any large collections of people are dicey. But what should happen if you find yourself forced to attend?...

By replaying the day-long scenario multiple times, you can experiment and try to minimize damage to the world while grabbing whatever chances you get to improve someone's life indirectly. Although it's not too tough to successfully desert Earth, the true depth of the game comes from retracing your paths and performing the right actions to take advantage of your behavior-altering powers and change people's lives for the better. The best possible way to play the game would have you tearing across town, making occasionally illogical decisions, and spreading goodwill like a madman before disappearing, ultimately setting back Hell's progress on the town by years.

This extremely simple gameplay can get complicated very quickly - I have a bunch of ideas for specific situations and events that can arise, but I'll keep them to myself if I ever actually make the game.

The more influence a character has, the less safe it is for you to be in them - you want to quickly leave someone who's already clinically depressed or someone who owns a gun, but it may be safer to hang out in the body of a baby for a while. Of course, if you just stay a baby, you won't have any rest alone - its crying will bring its sleepless mother, and a demon alone with an infant and someone that frazzled and unhappy will lead to very bad things.

And just to boot, the game would be playable with just the mouse - click to advance text/scene, right click to jump into different body.

edit: (ha ha WHOOPS missed the whole "one line" thing, how about this: "Bottles' Revenge as a visual novel where you minimize the impact of your own harmful actions")

[Player Ʒ]

The time is 1978, you're a space shooter guy blah blah blah. Shoot things with laser guns, fly around in single-person ships, and save colonies and that kind of crap.

[Sir Raptor]

@disparat
Nobody listens to the whole one line thing. In my experience, the game ideas I've made with more details have gotten much more praise than my simple tweet-level ideas.

On that note, I was looking at the trailer for Routine, and realized it was somewhat similar to the trailer for ZombiU, and decided I'd like to make a game based on the connecting aspect: a frozen world.

A first-person exploration adventure game. You play a figure who has somehow become trapped outside of time; you can move around the area, but everything around you is frozen in time. With no memory of who you are, your only clue is a slip of paper in your pocket telling you to find the spot where you were displaced, and time will flow again. But how will you find your place in the frozen world? And when you see the state that the world is in, will you really want to find it?

The biggest "Oh, crap" moment comes about halfway through, where you enter an open door, and in the distance, you see something move.

[GhostBomb]

A match-3 involving a crane to move numbered and colored boxes around as forklifts deliver them. No one in the warehouse understands the magic of disappearing boxes and goes bankrupt for terrible business and loss of goods.

Aha, it's an anti-match 3.  Avoid matching them in groups of 3, or you lose! :p

Oh, wow, that's actually brilliant.

I could see this being a huge hit.

[actual]

Game I am working on:

You are the Captain (think Adama more than Picard) of a military star ship in command of its rail guns, missile bays, fighter squadrons, and its crew, seeing only what the captain would see and giving orders to officers who in turn give orders on down the chain of command. No God's eye views, no direct manipulation of ships like a kid in a sandbox.

[Eatingburger]

[Sir Raptor]

Game I am working on:

You are the Captain (think Adama more than Picard) of a military star ship in command of its rail guns, missile bays, fighter squadrons, and its crew, seeing only what the captain would see and giving orders to officers who in turn give orders on down the chain of command. No God's eye views, no direct manipulation of ships like a kid in a sandbox.

That.... actually exists, sort of. It's a big multiplayer game where everyone uses their own computer as a radar or missile launcher or navigator or whatnot, and the captain gets the main screen that shows any important info that is put up.

[Malky]

Game I am working on:

You are the Captain (think Adama more than Picard) of a military star ship in command of its rail guns, missile bays, fighter squadrons, and its crew, seeing only what the captain would see and giving orders to officers who in turn give orders on down the chain of command. No God's eye views, no direct manipulation of ships like a kid in a sandbox.

That.... actually exists, sort of. It's a big multiplayer game where everyone uses their own computer as a radar or missile launcher or navigator or whatnot, and the captain gets the main screen that shows any important info that is put up.

It's called Artemis!

http://www.artemis.eochu.com/

[actual]

Yup, I've seen some of the artemis vids, although it has more of a Star Trek vibe rather than BSG, Honor Harrington which is what I am going for.. It looks pretty cool though. Think of my game as Artemis for people with no friends . Wait that includes me....

[Mono]

I think about making a piece of music that is basically fully explorable in a world. Different sections of the song can be found in different areas of the world. Like maybe you will climb a mountain to be met by a breezing synth or exploring a cave could give you some echoed percussion. Each song should be it's own world. You would spawn at a random point in the world, hence making each playthough/listen unique. Each player would then walk away with a different interpretation and mindset. It would be interesting to incorporate story, I love albums that tells stories only using abstract means.
 
Many look at art as something that never changes and always stays true to the creators original vision. Traditionally an album always stays the same every time you listen. The most interesting pieces of music gives you something new every each listen, picking up on subtleties. This would be taking advantage of something that is unique about games and the interactivity of the player. Maybe it would be possible to enhance the listening experience? It's an interesting way to tackle music composition as well as storytelling within music.

I might just be describing kind of what "Proteus" already does. I just think that concept can be further explored. Would make this if I had patience.

[Zest]

Bullet-hell action-RPG with asymmetric multiplayer. One person lays down enemies and traps just ahead of a group of violent adventurers. The overlord/DM/dungeon bastard buys things to lay down with points accrued from players getting damaged or taking too long to combat threats. Could even expand it into a Descent-like campaign, where the players journey through multiple dungeons as they and the Dungeon Bastard both get stronger.

Also, a Mass Effect demake with Star Fox 64 branching paths and Jet Force Gemini-inspired gameplay.

[Mercy404]

^^
Sounds like it could be really fun 

Mine is a Zombie Apocalypse focused Dwarf Fortress style game. I'm working on the basics of the engine at the moment, and still tossing around ideas. Not sure if I want to do something more construction focused, perhaps indirectly controlling military forces responsible for clearing the infected from an overrun city, or something more survival focused, like indirectly controlling a small group of survivors in the city. I should probably prototype both...