Simulator Game Simulator where you play a guy playing a simulator game and have to make sure he doesn’t forget to sleep or get fired but manages to successfully plow that virtual field every time.
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.
Isn’t there a thing on Google earth where you can sorta do that?
A modern version of the 1998 Sierra game with real world data would be great. I spent so much time in the freedrive mode on that back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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
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.
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
Happiness.
Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.
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.
The one I’ve had in my head for a while is a “Factory” simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you’d actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.
There’s a game called Automation that covers some of these aspects.
Definitely don’t play eve online
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!
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
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.
A rocket design simulator in the same sort of vein as kerbal space program or juno new origins/simplerockets, but as realistic as reasonably possible and with as many options as can reasonably be programmed in (so for example, rather than just placing an engine or getting to specify a couple parameters like nozzle size, you’d have to specify the power cycle and number of combustion chambers per turbopump, size and construction material of various major components, fuel and oxidizer type, etc)
That sounds delightfully complicated
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.