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.
Well I have great news for you. That game already exists. Look up Operation Tango.
Oh damn. I just looked it up and it seems like fun. Now if only I had any friends…
Look up black hat cooperative! It’s vr but sounds pretty similar to what you after describing.
I don’t have VR, but that sounds cool. Actually the thing that came to mind when I was describing it was “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”
That actually exists. Operation Tango if I recall correctly.
deleted by creator
I never expected to find the idea of a game based on finding utilities underground to be exciting but you did it. I’m in.
deleted by creator
Lmao this is hilarious. You could also throw in kids from the neighborhood stealing the little red flags 🚩 that are left in the ground for marking digs
A few things to remember to add:
- False positives
- Abandoned utilities
- Utility maps and GPS coords that were never made, were never updated, or are flat out wrong
- Contractors who will make every excuse and lie about what happened
- Random people asking if your digging for gold and worried if you’re going to tear up their lawn
deleted by creator
This is a genuinely great idea. I’ve been playing Dave the Diver and I can see this having a similar level of management, slowly introducing you to the new roles - first you’re just marking, and over time you’re managing more and more of the whole process and earning money on the way.
Heaps of room for cool visuals like revealing the pipes you find, cutscenes showing work done/completed.
Love it! 100% would play this.
Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world
I would love this, put on an audiobook, get stoned, and drive around the alps or Southeast Asia. No traffic and no danger
Alps? No traffic? Mate, have you ever tried crossing the Alps during holiday season?
Nope! But why would they program the traffic into such a simulation?
Realism!
what if they made it multiplayer
I would not play such a game
The closest thing to that would probably be euro truck simulator 2
City Car Driving exists, but I don’t know how extensive it is. You can also install mods on ETS2 to drive around in normal cars.
I tried that on my steam deck, controller support is non existent from when I last played
Id say closest game right now is assetto Corsa with mods
Ets2 has trucks, even if you mod a car in it still feels and drives like a truck
I want to rip it around my home town in a fast car, swerving through traffic lool
Just wait for content creators to play this drunk
Beam.ng has some pretty good maps where you can just drive around. They aren’t quite fleshed out as much but there’s a ton of mods too so you might be able to find one that’s just a Sunday driver.
I’d say assetto Corsa is better right now, beamng feels like a crash simulator or even just a scene creator rather than a proper driving sim
In asetto Corsa I can get real world cars in real world maps and drive it around
I’d like a realistic ecosystem simulator where it isn’t from a human perspective. Like, maybe you start as a beaver and build a damn and it changes your river and has lots of effects on other species. Maybe then you switch to a bear and eat a salmon. Does a bear shit in the woods? It does! And it helps the trees.
As a non realistic version, have you played timber born? It’s about beavers making dams and towns, but very much not realistic.
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.
Not quite the same, but Snowrunner does detailed mud simulation well… and you get to drive various vehicles through it
I’ve played it a bit. The winch cables are a lot of 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
The game ‘Captain of Industry’ isn’t a simulator, but it did come to mind when reading this comment. Kinda like cities skylines but with a heavy focus on excavation. There’s one map where I spent hours excavating a path up a mountainside to escape the starting area.
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.
You could do that in the original Operation Flashpoint. Don’t think there was a loader, though.
Planetside 2 also has a lot of things like that. Not a loader, but most vehicles have separate drivers and gunners (with a few exceptions).
It would actually make a good VR game you could play sitting in a chair
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.
I wonder if AI’s like ChatGTP make this more achievable
I’ve 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.
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.
On a similar note, middle management simulator
deleted by creator
You have to simulate a metropolitan police department for a futuristic city. You have to maintain funding by making sure neighborhoods and districts are safe. There would be side missions where you take out the local gangs in that area, discover that there’s a evil, crime syndicate that’s manipulating crime within the city. You have to capture, interrogate, and decide to either charge someone or let them go. Your actions determine what kind of department you run. Are you corrupt? Are you by the books? Do you inspire people to do better, or do you strike fear in the citizens of your city. It’d be completely open world, you’d control your department on an overhead map, assign cops certain roles or positions at certain locations. You maintain relationships with your cops, and you have to go home daily, and hope your second in command is up to the tasks of maintaining things without you. You also have to contend with corrupt cops and corrupt politicians that provide your funding. Do you risk losing funding and your position? Or do you make your citizens proud by upholding the law?
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.
Happiness.
Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.
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
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
I can see that as the logical conclusion of your game. You really should make the ultimate vomit cannon like that. Maybe you could license it to a company that tests anti-nausea pills or something.
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
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
Maybe it exists already but I’d love a good hiking simulator for a console where when you take stunning snapshots you could send them to your phone and use as backgrounds.
Virtual Virtual Skeeball simulator.