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What is something you would like to see in a game?
(programming.dev)
Couch co-op.
Couch co-op is rare these days, but I would like to see more co-op in general. I used to have game nights on Friday night with friends on discord, but we just ran out of good games to play. Limiting factor being how many people can play at the same time. Most of the co-op games we have right now seem to be designed to make you miserable. You’re gonna fail, but how long can you last? I just want to have some fun with 2-6 friends without getting discouraged. One of the best ones we played was “Golf With Your Friends”. I don’t even like golf, but we all could play, no one had to sit out, and we had a blast until it got boring.
You ever play the Jackbox games? That's our go to when we have more than a few people.
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I've always wanted a sci fi themed game that plays like a Diablo style dungeon crawler. Sort of a cross between Duskers and Diablo, if that makes sense. You travel in a junky ship from space derelict to space derelict. You (and your party) explore these ghost ships looking for gear and upgrades for yourselves and your ship.
The overall story would be some quest for artifacts and navigational data to help you open a warp gate and escape the dying star system. You'd have playable classes like space marine, psycher, technician, doctor, etc. NPCs could be a variety of monsters and zombie astronauts. There would also be environmental hazards and puzzles and such.
Sorry, this is probably waaayyyy more than you were asking us for. Ignore me or cherry pick anything you like. =)
this would be so fucking cool. if i trusted Blizzard to even make Diablo anymore I'd argue a StarCraft game that plays like an ARPG that would be too rad.
If someone knows a game like this, please chime in.
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Cheat codes that are helpful in allowing people with not enough time to sit and grind things out or fuss with mods to play through the story while still interacting with the core mechanics.
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i miss text based muds
more text less 3d
Can I counter this request by asking for more 3D?
I also want more text though, esspecially if that text is also 3D.
You're a monster.
I thought we saw the original Lucifer, but this is him in another dimension.
i miss text based muds
They never left.
Mudlist (663 muds)
I feel that the genre kind of stagnated, though.
EDIT: Though only a handful of those support encrypted connections, which in practice probably doesn't matter that much, but annoys the hell out of me, given that in the period from when MUDs were in their heyday to today, almost everything online became encrypted.
I could sort of understand it if they were leveraging UDP or something, but they're normally just running on telnet. It should be possible to shove a connection through TLS. You can even tack it on with no codebase modifications using something like stunnel.
Achaea is still going strong.
Sunless skies and sunless seas is great
They have a fair bit of text to read, and a unique writing style that a lot of folks like, but I'd have a hard time calling them MUDs.
They're single-player games, which is kinda fundamentally at odds with being a multi-user dungeon.
I could maybe see a game that plays like a single-player MUD working for some people, but they also don't really have a world with characters and such roaming around, other than the monsters that are within a certain distances of you. And while they don't have 3d, they're a 2d graphical game; you don't interact with them via a text-based interface (which isn't a hard requirement of MUDs, but sounds like is what the parent poster was going for).
Ridiculous physics is always fun.
Add a rolling (dodging) mechanic, even if it's not a fighting game.
I will try to add every single thing suggested here
I wouldn't, if you want the game to do well.
And I'd rather not constrain you to do so, because I don't want to negatively-impact your game.
But I think that the discussion is an interesting one to have.
Let's see. What are some of the things that I've missed or wanted?
Stale Genres
There are some genres that were once bigger, haven't had a lot going on for a while. I kind of miss these.
- Space-based fighter combat. Freelancer-type games. Based on Star Citizen's funding, a lot of people want more entrants here. I've theorized and read guesses before about why not a lot has happened here. I think that some of it is because the technology advanced; at one point in time, hardware was limited. Rendering outer space was relatively-easy, so it was a good match for back around 2000. Today, doing atmospheric fighters is easier. There were some popular "space fighter" movies, and spaceflight was relatively new; stuff like Babylon 5, Star Trek, and Star Wars all inspired people to want to be in those worlds. These tended to have a world where space combat was a lot like carrier combat in World War II; it used non-Newtonian physics (space fighters flew like terrestrial fighters through a liquid when turning), combat happened at close ranges, spacecraft were piloted, etc. I didn't really like Elite Dangerous's "faux online" model, though I suspect that it looked pretty with VR hardware. Egosoft's X series is more about managing an empire than dogfighting.
Game types with few examples
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Early Close Combat-style games. I liked the early Close Combat games. These are top-view, real-time-tactics games. They weren't very well-balanced, but they let one build up a force to run around fighting stuff with. They did not have a strategic map -- I never really enjoyed the strategic side of refighting the things, kind of missed not having to think about the strategic layer, but still liked the ability to build up a force over time, kind of Homeworld-style. There are some vaguely-similar games, but nothing all that close.
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Air combat flight sims with a dynamic campaign engine where one can affect the flow of the game. Creating good game AI is hard. Creating even tactical AI has been difficult. Creating an AI capable of doing an operational-level dynamic campaign has been extremely rare. Most games that do it have had it modded in and are in very elderly games; IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 had a dynamic campaign, though not one where a pilot could realistically do much to affect the outcome. I understand that Falcon 4.0 BMS has had it modded in. These are pretty elderly games.
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Terraria/Starfield. I liked these. I'd like to see more similar games. I'd like to see more automation support, ways to create bases that could be doing things (or pretending to do things, have some effect over time) when you're away. There's the Factorio factory-building genre, but that's not really the same thing; it's entirely-focused on automation.
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Kenshi. I can't find any similar games. You control a squad, starting with one character. It can grow. You can build outposts and put some characters to work on automated tasks at them. The world dynamically evolves; factions can take control of different towns and such and the world changes as a result of this. There's a sequel in the works, but it's pretty unique. Mount & Blade: Warband has some similarities -- band of characters, dynamically-evolving world, but isn't really the same type of game at all. Has "battlefields" separate from the strategic world, whereas Kenshi has one continuous map, has whole armies, doesn't permit creation of new outposts, doesn't really model what's going on at an outpost, only permits a static set of improvements to an outpost, etc.
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A Command: Modern Operations-like game that works on Linux. This is more-or-less a one-of-a-kind game, more of an operational-level hard realism military sim that can handle most modern military hardware. Unfortunately, it's also unusual in that it's one of the few games on Steam that doesn't work on Linux. No real alternatives. I'd like it even more if it supported a dynamic campaign rather than fixed, scripted campaigns, though that might be getting greedy.
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Wargame: Red Dragon-like game with good single-player support. I don't know quite how to describe this. It's a bit like a MOBA, but plays more like a real-time-tactical game, with more-accurate modeling of real-world units realism. I am totally uninterested in playing it multiplayer, which is unfortunate, because Eugen saw it as an almost-purely-multiplayer-oriented game. Eugen makes Steel Division 2, which has...well, better single-player support, including a strategic-map campaign and considerably more-sophisticated single-player tactical AI, but that covers World War II. Not that there's anything wrong with WWII, but there are a lot of games that cover it. Wargame: Red Dragon covered the late Cold War. I'd like to have a more-contemporary game; there isn't a lot of coverage of newer military hardware.
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There are a couple of NSFW games I'd like to see more of, but you ruled those out, and I'm not sure that this is the best forum for those, anyway.
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Moddable, open-world games. This is probably way out of scope for an indie developer, unless they create a whole new ecosystem. Bethesda is probably the premiere example of this, but there's a lot that Bethesda hasn't done that I'd like to see. They haven't really developed a very successful way to make more money off people playing their game in modded, which means that they don't have a lot of incentive to improve that, which I think is at the root of a lot of the other problems. I don't mind giving them more money, but I want them to improve the modding situation. I'd like to have solid diagnostic and script profiling tools, and preferably a standard language, like Javascript or Lua or something. I'd like to have support for parallelized scripting of some form, even if those need to run in isolation under constraints. I'd like to have a reasonably-sandboxed scripting environment, so that I don't need to be paranoid about downloading and using random mods -- something that is a chronic problem with many games and their mods. I'd like to have a system that can perform polygon generation and reduction dynamically -- like, a map specifies a Bezier curve, and throwing more hardware at it just lets the engine generate more polygons; that'd be friendly to games that are expected to be played for many years. Throw a model at the thing, and it -- maybe with some offline analysis -- can come up with some kind of a reasonably-simplified model to display at distance, automatically billboard the thing at range (I think that existing tools can do the latter for Bethesda's stuff). Keep loading out of the render threads so that loading doesn't cause the frame rate to hiccup (Starfield's engine is much better at this; I dunno how current Unreal is in open-world stuff). Avoid the limitations of static precombines in Fallout 4's engine (Starfield may do this; I'm not conversant enough with the internals); this prevented some objects from being removed at runtime, since the engine wasn't capable of recomputing data at runtime used for optimized display. I'd like to have support for more-sophisticated pathing, like for creatures that can jump and climb. I'd like to see in-game building support (not just for players, but for map development). I'd like to see profiling and suggestions (e.g. "this area of the map has the worst performance issues"). I'd like to see computer-assisted end-user diagnosing mods conflicts in the way that Conflict Catcher used to do for extensions on the classic Mac OS -- do a
git blame-style binary search across sets, enabling-and-disabling extensions and asking if a problem goes away, to try to find a single-extension problem in with a number of tests logarithmic in the number of mods, and able to find conflicts involving multiple extensions as well. I'd like to have support for streaming data from a remote system and having an engine that can run without data being fully-downloaded so that one can start playing before something is fully downloaded.
Functionality I'd like to see improved upon
- Game AI. For a long time, I've heard many promises about what a new game will do in terms of game AI, and this is probably one of the largest areas where games tend to disappoint. I think that that's partly because this is dealt with later during development, partly because it's just a hard problem, and partly because there doesn't seem to be a standard cross-game "game-AI engine". I'd like it to be possible to record playthroughs and, with some annotation from developers as to actions, learn from player data to optimize strategies. I'd like to be able to play some games optimally in the sense that von Neumann "solved" poker in terms of mathematically optimal play absent tells. I'd like to be able to have generic ways of imposing "human-like" limitations on a game AI so that it can play suboptimally in ways that feel more like a human opponent, like constraining the number of evaluations performed. Basically, I feel like the "game AI" problem should be more-solved in a cross-game way than it is today.
Features that I'd like to see used more
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High-res DLC for pixel art games. Low-res pixel art can reduce art costs. That's great. But then, sometimes a game does really well. I'd like to be able to buy high-res art for it. Very few games have done this (Cave Story being one of the few).
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Music available for purchase. I can at least understand not doing this for the few games that permit one to use arbitrary music playlists (like Stellaris).
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For card games using a standard deck, using four different colors for suits. It improves readability. Balatro kind of does this with orange diamonds, but the clubs and spades are pretty similar.
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Better touchscreen-capable text-based interactive fiction. I'm not sure exactly what I want here, but I can list some items. Text-based interactive fiction has kind of stagnated; there was a wave starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s or so with limited human-ish language parsers, stuff like Zork. AI-based generation sounded neat, but the reality is...kind of meh, since generating text that reads kind of like human-written text doesn't really make for a human-written game. Though the ability to illustrate games in real-time based on conditions with latent-diffusion models is kind of cool, and that seems to be viable. I thought that touchscreens would herald in a new era where multiple-choice would work well, since touchscreens don't permit for typing, but phones and tablets with limited battery power should work well with text-based interactive fiction, but what we've gotten has IMHO been...underwhelming. Choice of Games has a lot of multiple-choice interactive fiction games, but most of them basically play out where one seeks to conform to one particular archetype and one's success in the game is judged by how closely one does that. That...isn't all that much fun, to my way of thinking, though the writing is often decent. In 2024, I think that having support for speech synth of the text should be an option, though I personally wouldn't use it.
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Low-res pixel art games having full 24-bit palettes. I think that low-res pixel art games are a great way to reduce development costs. But I don't play them because I want a retro experience where NES-style (or God forbid, even earlier) palettes are used. My monitor can display 24-bit color, and it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to permit for that.
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Low-res pixel art games avoiding chiptune music. Similar to the above. I think that low-res pixel art games are a great way to reduce development costs. I like them for that reason. However, music that sounds like it was done on a limited-capability frequency-based synthesizer of the sort that a lot of early computers and video game consoles doesn't do that. Some people like it for nostalgia reasons. I don't; I think that it just sounds awful.
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Exploration of other ways to make the brain "fill in" for limited graphic arts work. Low-res pixel art is a good way to do this. Basically, if you make art that isn't too high-fidelity, a players brain does a good job of "filling in" the missing detail. But I'm confident that it's not the only way to do it, that there are other routes, forms of distortion and obscuring the image, that will have similar effects. Low-res pixel art has been very heavily used. I'd like to see other things...I don't know, maybe having stuff in the foreground obscuring some of a character, or something like that.
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Use of dynamic, dramatic lighting in 2d games. Stuff like Starbound but more-so.
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Good, physics-following fabric in games. We've been banging on this for years. I still don't feel that we're there. I don't think that we're anywhere near the theoretical limits of what the hardware can do. I'd like there to be a fabric engine that can handle collisions and fluid forces, like wind and such, being wet, being pulled, etc. It's not really critical to any game, but I've seen so many damn research papers come out about it over the years and the reality in 2024 is still underwhelming to me.
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Similarly, I still don't feel that volumetric fog is where it could be (at least in the games I've played).
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Similarly, for trees blowing in the wind. Almost every game outdoors needs to deal with this. Here, I'm talking about procedurally-generating leaf rustle noises and making realistic tree movement. This seems like the kind of thing that should be done once and used in many games: it's not a core feature of any game, but many games would like this to be done. I haven't been blown away by what I've seen.
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Real-world terrain and foliage generation. I'm not familiar with the state-of-the-art here; the last time I was playing with procedural terrain generators, they could do wind and water erosion and such, let one paint a heightmap. But we aren't, that I've seen, at the point that I can just say "generate real-world environments" and have something that looks all that much like a natural environment on Earth spanning different biomes come out. A lot of games would like to take advantage of such functionality. We've had lots of stabs at it taken. I'd rather that map-making for Earth-based games be able to start with at least an auto-generated environment that looks outright photorealistic, and then letting the mapmaker tune it for their game. Hand-building natural environments is human-labor intensive and something that lots of games have to do. Bonus for providing levers to adjust the terrain procedurally.
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Flight-sims having support for analog flightsticks. I don't know if this is actually a good business decision. Gamepads with analog thumbsticks are "good enough" that most flightsims can make do, and so people are less-willing to get analog flightsticks than PC gamers were in the 1990s or so. But for any dogfighting games, absent a lot of assistive stuff, it's kinda nice to have the kind of accuracy that a flightstick provides. I'm willing to tolerate not having some kinds of real-world stuff that tend to come with flightstick use, like having to worry about trim, but being able to use a dedicated flightstick is nice. If I were really going to get greedy, it'd be nice to have support for force-feedback sticks in games that simulate pre-fly-by-wire aircraft, but I don't think that there's enough demand to even support that hardware market any more, and despite the neat things that VR can do for flight sims, it doesn't do force-feedback. Note that I'm not talking about rumble motors, which are sometimes what someone means when they talk about force feedback, but actual resistance to moving a stick based on the real-world resistance a stick would have had.
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Ability to delete many saved games at a go.
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Ability to retain an arbitrary number of saved games, and frequent checkpointing. If it doesn't ruin the game to let me roll back, I'd like to have the option to do so. I don't really want to deal with manually whacking "quicksave" all the time, and space for save games isn't generally an issue.
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A procedurally generated escape the city third person zombie shooter with several randomized unique quest lines that can be discovered by scouting the city. Each quest line leads to a different escape route. (Military has surrounded the city)
Zombies should be 28 day later, one touch and you are infected zombies.
Maybe add some basic crafting and possibly coop or pvpve elements. One escape should take only a couple hours. The randomness gives the replayability. (A bit rogue like)
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The narrator
Activate god mode and gain a small fraction of the power of the developer. You can edit the actual source, brick yourself, and quick reload from within the game. Show me the real errors with the file name and the line number.
I want the things I do and the decisions I make to actually matter to the story and not just like a good or bad choice shit either.
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Rolling HP like in Earthbound and Mother 3. You get a big hit - your HP does not decrease to the point immediately rather starts rolling down, even if you've got a mortal damage. This way you can still have time to finish the fight and survive if your HP don't reach 0 in the meantime, or even heal yourself. Also Luck (or Guts) as a stat, which can sometimes leave you at 1 HP no matter how overkill damage you just got.
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Character creation
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A hairstyle option that is actually a toupee. If your character is hit / impacted / falls / etc, the toupee can sometimes fall off l. The character suffers a debuff until they pick it back up or buy a new one. It is not apparent during character creation that what the player is selecting is a toupee, and the mechanic is not explained in any way.
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I really love when RPGs give unique dialog options based on non-dialog skills.
For example, if you are spec'd into a certain class of weapon you unlock dialog with a relevant vendor. Or if you have a high gambling skill, your character can talk about the finer points of gambling.
Taking this a step further, reactivity from having accomplished something requiring application of these skills allowing unique dialog.
This can all either be unique flavor dialog, dialog that gets the conversation to where it would have gone anyway, or dialog that opens up new quests or quest resolutions.
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A bucket of dehydrated water, which you have to reconstitute by adding water, in order to put out an invisible fire. No idea what kind of game you're making, could be a very odd addition to something like a racing sim.
could be a very odd addition to something like a racing sim.
Maybe not as odd as you think, since the methanol fuel used in many motorsports series actually does burn invisibly
There should be a mode where you can sale propane and propane accessories.
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License the game under the GPL, the game itself is a boomer shooter (using the GZDoom engine ofc) where you kill proprietary software executives and other anti-libre demons to free Linus Torvalds from the grasp of Bill Gates.
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A 3D rail shooter where you play as various ranks of biblically accurate angels shooting down demons.
2 minutes and i already regret my decisions
REAL CAR ACCIDENTS!! 🚘💥🚙
Often times, games underplay the medical and psychological impacts of traumatic events, so we unconsciously think that we would generally be fine if we were to experience a car accident.
Trigger warning of car accidents and general PTSD
If you get in a car accident, you end up in the ICU and can't get out of bed for weeks at the least. Once you get out, you have to complete physical therapy over months to get a portion of your mobility back. Once you are out of the hospital and no longer have the 24-hr support of sympathetic medical staff...
PTSD and grief! The person develops PTSD and has relevant triggers that uncontrollably illicit sympathetic nervous system activation (fight-or-flight). At first, it's only car stuff. A car back fires? Person zones out their environment, time slows down, and only nearby cars that are brightly glowing amd have the video quality sharpness set to max. Literally everything else is blurred and muffled out. The activation lasts for a while. When the person comes back, they're embarrassed. Slowly, they start cutting away people from their life as more stimuli begins to trigger the person and can't function in social settings without self-medicating. Eventually, they develop a drug problem just to make it through the day, while experiencing insomnia every night. But wait, there's more! There was a close friend with them in the car that died in the accident, so whenever they are reminded of said person, they fall into crying spell and can't function for a while as they wrestle with the guilt of feeling responsible for the loss. The insomnia and overwhelming loneliness ensures that they wake up with only half their health everyday.
While morbid af, I think it would help advocate for victims of trauma and loss. Also, it might encourage to people think before they behave in ways that are too risky when driving.
- I dont think it follows itch.io rules(i am also excluding comments if they dont follow the rules for comments under games if they were applied to posts)
- I have no idea how i would even begin adding this to a space shooter where you play as a biblically accurate angels and have to defeat astronaut zombies that came from the underworld while escaping a dying solar system
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Also, there should be an option where the police come to you after your accident and take your details, only for you to be phoned by Ambulance Chasers the very next day.
I want to run over, climb into my X-wing, power it up, and fly out of the hangar into the ongoing battle. I want a fully simulated astromech droid too, with its own mind and memories.
Capitalism! in the modern area with a tad more complexity.
In a space game, more consistency with application of artificial gravity tech. If all floors can pull you to them "because science" then a realistic consequence would be regular use of walls / ceilings as walking space for more efficient spaceship layouts. It could add an interesting dimension (pun intended) to exploration / combat etc depending on what your game is
so many frogs
Hack and slash where you start as a base class and then level up/evolve, Pokemon style into some super awesome final class (Paladin, Wizard, Rogue, etc)
Back in the old NES days, there was a game called Bionic Commando. The character has a bionic arm that is shot out like a grappling gun to aid in movement. That was bitchin' and unique.
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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