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[JamesGecko]

I came up with a bunch of random one-button games and control schemes I wanted to try before settling on one to run with. I'm sure other people did too. I'm never going to get around to making most of mine, so I figured I'd dump a few here. Feel free to grab something and run with it, or post your own ideas. 

Some of this is might be obvious, but we've all been working in isolation (more or less), so I have no idea.

Grid-based selection system
I've been thinking about how an advance-wars style game would work with it. You'd basically have a 2x2 grid covering the screen, with one tap switching which quadrant is selected. Holding the button would bring up another 2x2 grid within the selected area of the larger grid. This smaller grid would be a 1:1 mapping to the on-screen tiles in that quadrant, tapping the button to switch between the four panes and a button hold to select a unit. Then the whole process would repeat to place the unit in a new location. For minimizing button presses, quadrants out of range of the unit would be grayed out and not selectable.

Puzzle cube game
Have a cube with a 3x3 (4x4? 5x5?) grid on each side. It rotates around the X-axis along a row of the grid. Button causes a colored marble to be put on the grid and for the cube to be rotated 90 degrees and move along the intersecting row on the grid. The colored marbles would be placed in sequence as shown in a "next piece" type thing on the side of the screen. The objective is to make matches of colors as large as possible. A match of three (four? five?) could be automatically removed from the grid and scored. Or a match could be scored when you drop another marble on top of an existing one.

If we really wanted to make things interesting, we could change the marbles to cubes and allow the player to stack them on top of each other.

If it's too hard to make matches of marbles, we could just have a dominant color per side of the cube and you'd get points for how many marbles of a color you got on a side. Maybe each side could have a "goal" color and the player has to get 20 marbles of that color per side.

Might need a max time limit before the marble would be automatically placed.

I guess the rotating cube idea is somewhat inspired by this: http://store.steampowered.com/app/37800/

I haven't played it. There's also a flash game where you're rotating a cube with stuff on it. I forget exactly what it was called or what the objective was.

Game: Spider Skydiver
Vertically scrolling game. There's a spider falling from the sky, leaving a trail of silk behind her. Pressing and holding the button causes the spider to stop letting out silk, causing her to swing back and forth. Releasing the button would cause the spider to use the momentum from the swing to move in the direction she was swinging. There would be a series of pegs placed randomly. If the silk touches a peg, it would stick to it. Some of the pegs would give points if you passed to the right or left of them. Miss enough of these pegs and you would get a game over.

[Katamaran]

Game: speedy dungeon
this one was a mostly traditional dungeon crawler experiment. the theme would be, as per the name, getting through dungeon as fast as possible. Each button press was a step in the dungeon and the player character had some kind of maze solving algorithm (probably just the right hand rule :p) battles are action based, pressing it swung the weapon and holding it charges magic. leveling up is done in a slot machine style. I was thinking about bringing it to s crazy extreme and having the player trying to get through dialogue sections as quickly as possible by mashing the button, like people DO in rpgs :p

[AlbeyAmakiir]

RTS concept:
Units randomly choose attack or advance when they appear. Tapping the button swaps. Holding the button sets everyone to hold position. As for resources, tapping swaps between "Gather resources" and "Build units". This makes for a lot of things to think about.

[caffeinekid]

I was considering a "kinda" remake of Blue Angel 69 which I think would work really well with a one switch control scheme. Maybe I will still do it.

[brog]

I was planning to make a multiplayer one where you have a series of rounds with scoring based on things like "count the number of times you tap the button" or "count when you pressed the button first", and an interesting scoring table like [1,2,10,3] or [-5,12,4,2] so that you'd have to try to press your button more times than all but one other player, or be the second person to press it.
Sounded interesting in theory; complicated mindgames etc.; but when I made a prototype it didn't seem to actually be.

[easynam]

I was planning to make a multiplayer one where you have a series of rounds with scoring based on things like "count the number of times you tap the button" or "count when you pressed the button first", and an interesting scoring table like [1,2,10,3] or [-5,12,4,2] so that you'd have to try to press your button more times than all but one other player, or be the second person to press it.
Sounded interesting in theory; complicated mindgames etc.; but when I made a prototype it didn't seem to actually be.

I had a similar idea. Basically it would be a series of 2 player matches where a points counter is incrementing in the middle. Whoever presses the button first gets the points and then it goes to the next match. In the end whoever had the most points overall wins.

You could technically win every match for sure by hitting the button straight away, but then you wouldn't get enough points to win in the end.