To post about games that haven't been made yet but would be neat.
I want a Stardew Valley-like that's also a Crusader Kings like.
Game pitches - free to a good home
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scratchingway
- Posts: 6
- Joined: Sun May 25, 2025 1:26 pm
- Location: texas... the lone star state
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Re: Game pitches - free to a good home
I've had "MGS5, but it's Touhou and/or Madoka" knocking around in my head for about a decade or so. I think I might have a design doc lying around for it somewhere, but if so I didn't get very far.
I was doing some work on a central Texas-inspired Pokémon setting. Preliminary monster and map designs, mostly. What I was really looking to capture was the essence of moving to an unfamiliar area and finding respite mostly in school extracurriculars. A problem was that a lot of what made those experiences peaceful (long bus rides, long walks to and from home, goofing off at school campuses) might pose pacing challenges for the game. I think this is something that might end up as fanfic because it has overlap with writing I plan to do for therapy reasons.
Something a bit more nebulous is an idea I had for a game that was like... I think it would have been something like Control, but the setting was supposed to evoke northern Mexico/southern Texas around the late 1800s. But it was basically about a conflict between night-empowered witches and sunlight-empowered gunslingers, in a geography that had a sharp contrast between eternal day and eternal night. An unlikely duo of witch and gunslinger were to end up unwinding a deeper, common history, and maybe unpack traditional gender roles along the way. But it's something I'd need to do a lot of historical/cultural research if I wanted to do it justice, so I haven't done much work on it. I think this was partially inspired by listening to Mike Duncan's series on the Mexican Revolution.
What else...
About 10-15 years ago I had thoughts about a game that compulsively lied to you. Misleading tutorials, incorrect UI values, that sort of thing. I don't recall if it was inspired by anything in particular but I was playing some amount of Twine games at the time. Recently I thought more about this and wanted to shoot for something more relentlessly hostile. Not merely sadistic in the vein of I Wanna Be The Guy, or repulsive like Cruelty Squad, but something that actively sought out to abuse and denigrate the player for playing it, for playing video games at all.
I love video games but I think sufficient engagement with the main channel of them can really infuse a person (and I am putting this very crudely) with a kind of dopamine addiction, with reactionary tendencies, with a fear of (in-game and IRL) friction. And gamer culture at large seems to reward a real uncritical attitude towards media, politics, life.
I wanted to make a game that made that people feel like a stupid asshole not just for playing things like Call of Duty or HogLeg, for compulsively seeking out gamerscore, for willingly engaging in FOMO events or co-signing microtransactions... but also for participating in or enabling bigotry in games spaces, for lacking in a critical attitude towards the medium, for being too rigid in interacting with a game the way the game tells you how to interact with it. I think I wanted to call it something like The Last Game You Should Ever Play, with the goal of producing a game that made people feel disgusted with themselves for playing so many fucking video games so mindlessly.
I'm still not sure how I would go about doing that responsibly. I am grappling with learning that I have a deeply-buried sadistic streak to me and I don't know how I could make something this hostile without also feeling severe guilt over subjecting others to something like that.
I think I also have loose fragments of ideas knocking around that familiarize gamers with how gambling companies prey on human psychology. I'm still working through guilt from time spent working in that industry and I feel obligated to at least try and tell people about that shit.
On a lighter note...
I recently had ideas for like an open-world SMB3 that was inspired by some of the weirder puzzly aspects of Void Stranger and Paquerette Down the Bunburrows, and memories I have of the far, far edges of Minecraft worlds. I wondered if it would be possible for me to make an engine for procedurally generating Mario-type levels that I thought would be worth playing. But the idea would be that for various reasons you would need to break the map in particular ways.
Huh, that all ended up being longer than I expected. Enjoy.
I was doing some work on a central Texas-inspired Pokémon setting. Preliminary monster and map designs, mostly. What I was really looking to capture was the essence of moving to an unfamiliar area and finding respite mostly in school extracurriculars. A problem was that a lot of what made those experiences peaceful (long bus rides, long walks to and from home, goofing off at school campuses) might pose pacing challenges for the game. I think this is something that might end up as fanfic because it has overlap with writing I plan to do for therapy reasons.
Something a bit more nebulous is an idea I had for a game that was like... I think it would have been something like Control, but the setting was supposed to evoke northern Mexico/southern Texas around the late 1800s. But it was basically about a conflict between night-empowered witches and sunlight-empowered gunslingers, in a geography that had a sharp contrast between eternal day and eternal night. An unlikely duo of witch and gunslinger were to end up unwinding a deeper, common history, and maybe unpack traditional gender roles along the way. But it's something I'd need to do a lot of historical/cultural research if I wanted to do it justice, so I haven't done much work on it. I think this was partially inspired by listening to Mike Duncan's series on the Mexican Revolution.
What else...
About 10-15 years ago I had thoughts about a game that compulsively lied to you. Misleading tutorials, incorrect UI values, that sort of thing. I don't recall if it was inspired by anything in particular but I was playing some amount of Twine games at the time. Recently I thought more about this and wanted to shoot for something more relentlessly hostile. Not merely sadistic in the vein of I Wanna Be The Guy, or repulsive like Cruelty Squad, but something that actively sought out to abuse and denigrate the player for playing it, for playing video games at all.
I love video games but I think sufficient engagement with the main channel of them can really infuse a person (and I am putting this very crudely) with a kind of dopamine addiction, with reactionary tendencies, with a fear of (in-game and IRL) friction. And gamer culture at large seems to reward a real uncritical attitude towards media, politics, life.
I wanted to make a game that made that people feel like a stupid asshole not just for playing things like Call of Duty or HogLeg, for compulsively seeking out gamerscore, for willingly engaging in FOMO events or co-signing microtransactions... but also for participating in or enabling bigotry in games spaces, for lacking in a critical attitude towards the medium, for being too rigid in interacting with a game the way the game tells you how to interact with it. I think I wanted to call it something like The Last Game You Should Ever Play, with the goal of producing a game that made people feel disgusted with themselves for playing so many fucking video games so mindlessly.
I'm still not sure how I would go about doing that responsibly. I am grappling with learning that I have a deeply-buried sadistic streak to me and I don't know how I could make something this hostile without also feeling severe guilt over subjecting others to something like that.
I think I also have loose fragments of ideas knocking around that familiarize gamers with how gambling companies prey on human psychology. I'm still working through guilt from time spent working in that industry and I feel obligated to at least try and tell people about that shit.
On a lighter note...
I recently had ideas for like an open-world SMB3 that was inspired by some of the weirder puzzly aspects of Void Stranger and Paquerette Down the Bunburrows, and memories I have of the far, far edges of Minecraft worlds. I wondered if it would be possible for me to make an engine for procedurally generating Mario-type levels that I thought would be worth playing. But the idea would be that for various reasons you would need to break the map in particular ways.
Huh, that all ended up being longer than I expected. Enjoy.
Re: Game pitches - free to a good home
Open world SMB3 is pretty dope. I've long thought about like a 2D Sonic Adventure - the hub worlds would be kinda like, Mega Man Zero style.