Looking for a game idea - any suggestions?

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I am just wondering what sort of game would capture the tiny-but-not-sad feeling you get when you consider the scale of the universe and the scale of human effort makes typing a letter like this one - A - appear on your screen.

I was just doing a modifier class for a button to add an arrow. I found a lovely way to do it with unicode characters. Then I found myself dwelling on how much work was done to create unicodes with all the different languages and symbols, which suprised me was only done in the 90’s.

That of course got me wondering about how much human effort that went from turning logic gates into systems of millions of gates, and then billions of gates to just enable me to show that unicode text. Which got me thinking about the game of life built in the game of life, or the computers people have built in minecraft to prove even minecraft is Turing complete.

That got me thinking about a video I saw recently of photos taken of a supernova that is still exploding, but putting photos together from telescopes of it from 2014 till now, makes a short and tiny glimpse of expanding gas that has been expanding for thousands of years. That light probably released millions of years ago before humans even existed, to travel light years to bounce off a gold plate, to be absorbed in a sensor so I can watch it on a device constructed of billions of gates.

And all this started making me sad, because whatever I have done, I have never pushed forward the academic knowledge of human kind, never contributed to the ladder of advancement, not even in a tiny way, and I will never see that explosion play out, I was not here when it started and I was not here when it finally fades out and is finally finished.

But then of course I realised that yes I am tiny, and we are only here for a blink of cosmological time, but we are, and will have been, a part of the network. And even tiny ripples expand outward forever. We are a tiny cog in a machine far vaster and more ancient that we can even imagine. But we are part of it, a vast network of influence and ripples of actions that like a butterflies wings can create a storm, we do have an impact, we do play a part. And it made me feel good, and it made me feel awe inspired and it made me feel a quiet sort of wow (I am at a loss for words about it).

And now I want to create that feeling in a game. I have no idea how, but that is what I am going to try and do in my next game. Any one got any ideas of how I can do this?

Or perhaps it is impossible, but I don’t think it is impossible. How do I generate that feeling I can’t even name yet, in a player that plays my game?

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Have you ever played QWOP?

Its just a game where you use Q, W, O, and P to move a runners quads / hamstrings and try to run either 50m or 100m. I remember it being incredibly difficult and I’ve never beat it without doing the splits cheat.

But to me it conveyed that disconnect feeling of “How can something as simple and small as walking be so complicated? If this game portrays it like this, how did we ever figure this out, and then went on to do even more?”

My suggestion is to take something that is basic to human nature, and make it hard to interact with. Maybe not as hard as QWOP, where it probably loses that magic feeling for something absurd. Try to impart “how the heck did we manage to figure this out?" to the player. Then try to make the effect multiply when multiple people / objects come together in the interest of a common goal.

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Then Bills of Gates inevitably leading to Amazon and corporate greed.

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Well i have a game idea. It’s mine idea but I don’t think so i can make this but you try..

A main chracter in a World. Where the main target is to defeat the enemy King who live in abendent castle with . This place is crushed. His dead army. ( Army of dead soldiers defense the castle and king. Many hidden traps in between. That stop plyer to reach to King.. ) And at final King fight you realise king is not easy to kill. King can spawn soldiers, Make blasts and control players health and resources. Like can reduces the health without Even moving and can can steal his weapon or potions and use against him.. )

Player sowan always in the nearby village whenever he can buy weapons Also can make House and can live a life requirment are simply food and cloth.. …

And other whatever you want to add in it .. it’s just a rough outline

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It’s just a normal 20s game idea

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Ohhh :frowning_face_with_open_mouth:.. ummm ok .. actually i don’t play games :video_game: so i don’t know about these things…

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I also haven’t played any horror game xD

Edit:I thought that it’s replay from another topic where we are talking about horror games lol

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Ok take care.. :relieved_face:..

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Oh I have played that, and it was incredibly difficult, but when you finally managed a few steps you felt wonderful! Thats an interesting thought. Thank you.

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All of my ideas for this revolve around starting tiny and getting bigger and bigger. Bacteria, multi-celled organism, plankton, fish, tiny land animal, eventually being bigger that a planet, until entire galaxies are in your control. But then I imagine the impossibility of this in terms of it actually being several games all tied together. (And it begins to sound like other evolution games).

I had an idea once about every time you died you either became a bigger animal or a smaller one depending on how well you did, a bit like reincarnation to a different body. But again, the scope of that was just too enormous for me to cope with, and I abandoned it early.

Oh well, I will keep thinking about it and see if anything pops into that muddled mess of trivial knowledge and snippets I call a brain.

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I have a entire universe level idea … but it needs a heavy amount of fundings , developer teams and many more … ahhh my dream game :smiling_face_with_tear:

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That’s a depression simulator if I’ve ever seen one. I love it!

You just described Spore.

This sounds interesting, but indeed could become a massive scope creep issue.
Did you see movie The Platform (2019)? It’s a horror about a huge prison tower, where the food is distributed from the top down, meaning these at the top floors get all the food they want, while these at the bottom need to survive on the leftovers at best and even push themselves to murder and cannibalism. Every day you wake on a different floor randomly with different cell mates, so you’re at the mercy of the Fate. There’s a lot of moral conundrums in the movie. The movie itself is far from being a masterpiece, but the idea is very interesting and it stuck with me as something worth exploring for a potential game.
Maybe you can make something out of it, as it seems to fit your overall mood somehow.

Good luck, looking forward to seeing what you come up with one way or another!

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Yeah it was spore. And look what that massive scope did to them.

I have seen clips of platform, and yes that is a very thought provoking idea. Thank you.

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A game where you play as an ant colony situated near a river. Your goal is to get the ant colony to the river’s other bank by constructing a bridge. You control an ant for exactly fifteen seconds, and in that very limited time you can move construction materials like sticks, leaves, or very small stones. When the fifteen seconds are up, that ant is stuck into repeating its single action on a loop-- but only if the relevant material is nearby. You then get control over a different ant. Because collected materials are persistent do not respawn or get reset, you’ll have to locate new materials yourself. And if you’re observant, you’ll quickly learn to move materials over vast distances by passing them on to your previous incarnations.

This is probably one of those ideas that’s more fun to fantasize about than to implement, and certainly more fun than to play.

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No problem! I did some brainstorming and could only think of a “making the alphabet” simulator in the same vein of QWOP, or a simulator for making bread the old school way, harvesting wheat, threshing, milling, and then baking / making a fire. I think the feeling would come if the only objective is “make bread” with no hand-holding.

Best of luck if you decide on something worth pursuing!

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By the way, music often conveys me these feelings and it sort of pops up in my mind as the image of a supernova in slow mo’ going back and forth between past and future.

Anyways…

As someone said, spore. But spore is nothing, for me, compared to Primordialis. It’s a recent game with free demo from which I’ve made all of what I’m telling you. If you’ve delved into most natural sciences, specially biology, this game will unveil all of what you’ve just read of in front of you.

You build cell by cell your creature and each cell has some special property. It’s meant as a roguelike in which you get to fight creatures that have been made exactly in the same way, with the different cells and mutations that randomly appear in each run. The game is not meant for you, you are prey to the systems. That is: things you use to hurt others, hurt you too.

A great example is electricity, one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Electricity, by the way, is also what drives your actions. You press space to generate electrical current on the things you want to use, maybe a booster. Thus, electricity is a double-edged weapon; it kills by overwhelming cells and causing involuntary triggers of actions. But, if you shock yourself, you risk potentially triggering your shocking cells and forming a loop that basically electrocutes yourself to death.

I have to say it. Primordialis, is not a good game, in my opinion. However, it is the best (playable) simulation of biomechanics. If you force yourself to play it, because you have to in its merciless world, you’ll then realize why everything is how it is, irl. Like, the most eye-opening moment for me was: I have this organ that propels poison. If I shoot it, it will also propel me into my poison. I could use poison-resistant cells, but the game is not that generous… I had to build fins to just hold me into place by friction. That’s how fins are born :sparkles: . Kind of…

The coolest thing of Primordialis is that you are not a strange macro organism aberration like in spore. You’re a microscopic organism, so what you build makes sense at one of the hardest levels to make sense out of. You can imagine why things happen in animals, but why they happen in bacteria? Well, now I get why they have flagella. AND IT’S BECAUSE I HAVE TO FREAKING ESCAPE LASERS.

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SimAnt, released in 1991.

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Well, if it already exists, then that certainly saves quite a lot of development time.

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I know exactly what you mean. You’re not trying to make a “fun mechanic.” You’re trying to create a perspective shift. Maybe make a massive procedurally generated universe to evoke this feeling? I got a similar feeling when I played No Man’s Sky.

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I think an animation could convey that feeling more easily.