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[mraphids]

I have been making a game which has some similarities to the game Everything in that you can grow from basically the size of the Universe and shrink down to the size of an atom.

You can jump on things, pick up things, put things down and shoot things. Also you can walk, drive and fly about.

But... I am struggling to find a way to make it into a compelling game.

One idea I had was that your mission is to find pieces of alien DNA around the Universe in order to construct a super-being. But not sure if this would be too easy/boring.

Also, I don't want it to be just a simple sandbox type game.

Can anyone think of any good game mechanics/genres that might work well with what I've got so far?

[valrus]

Maybe "naming" would be a good mechanic, like if you can spell their name using letters you've already scanned you can collect them.  Say you're at insect scale, and start out with knowing the letters A and N, and you come across a bunch of ants.  Scanning them gives you A _ _ or _ N _ or _ _ T, and when you find the latter, since you have the A and N you succeed and get the T.  Then if you scan a gnat, you see G _ _ _ and since you have the rest, you get the G.  This gives a bit of a puzzle structure to going around looking at things: "Okay, that's a horse but I don't have an H, what at this scale level starts with H?  Oh, a house, hopefully one of those is an H-giver..."

[mraphids]

Hmm, that's an interesting idea.

[ProgramGamer]

A cool thing to do could be to have it focused on exploration and discovery. Like, seeing what new things the world has to offer, and center that about sharing discoveries. You could be very relaxed about giving players the tools to explore the world at a good pace and have some sort of online community formed around exploring other people's discoveries.

I'm basically describing Noctis admittedly, but I still think it's an underexplored category of games.

[mraphids]

Well I'll check out Noctis, maybe it'll give me some good ideas!

[StefanSava]

it sounds to me like you would need some thing that is applied to all elements of your game and that the player can manipulate in some way or the other. And by doing so you should get emergence. This would drive the idea to explore, more of the world or grow or combine. I'll get back to you if i get a more concrete idea, this is very general but maybe it helps.