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  • 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.

  • Utility Locator Simulator.

    You know those "Call 811 before you dig!" signs? (Or, where I grew up, call JULIE?)

    In the real world, underground utilities are generally found by utility locators using tools that detect current running through either a metal pipe or wires, or through a tracer wire if the pipe isn't iron/steel. Utility locators do tickets called into 811, and go about neighborhoods (both city and rural) marking with paint on the ground where gas/electric/fiber/sewer/water/etc. utilities are, prior to construction where digging will happen.

    I feel like it'd be really fun to simulate someone using one of the detectors and having to go to some street location, find the utility pedestals or hookups to homes or businesses, and trace the lines and paint where they go.

    You could base it in real science like a lot of simulators out there, too. There's different techniques and frequencies you can use to detect underground utility lines, and different ways they can interfere with one another so that things go wrong and your markings are off.

    And the whole process of locating utilities could be very, very gamified. You could get a score on how well you marked them, and terrible things could happen if you were wrong.

    Like, maybe you marked a gas line incorrectly, so the next contractor to dig hits it and gets blown sky high when things explode. Or maybe an office building/school/whatever had to be emergency evacuated because your poor marking caused a gas leak when construction started.

    Or maybe you located the cable fiber to 200 homes in a neighborhood wrong, and an excavator cut it, and suddenly all those homes can't watch the Superbowl and the "happiness" of the neighborhood goes down.

    Or you located a water or sewer line wrong, and suddenly someone's back yard is filled with water/sewage and little Timmy gets sick and dies because his wading pool is full of poo.

    And you could get things to level up, too. Like, if you do good work and move to a better utility locator company, maybe they issue you a can of wasp spray.

    Or perhaps you befriend a beekeeper and they can come out and remove a swarm off of your utility pedestal so you don't get stung to death, and you can save the bees instead of killing them. Get an Environmentally Friendly badge achievement or something.

    Or you raise relationships with the construction contractors so they mark their locator tickets better so your job is easier. (Or you piss them all off, and they tell you to mark ALL utilities for three high-traffic blocks...when the only digging they're doing is a single stump in someone's back yard, far away from the horrible convoluted intersections you were forced to mark.) Or maybe homeowners like you, so they stop surrounding "ugly" utility pedestals on their properties with rose bushes so you don't have to crawl through thorns to get to it.

    I think it could be very fun, and also kinda raise awareness of what utility locators do and why.

  • You are a super intelligent sentient AI, the last remnant of an alien warship that fought in a losing battle. Your creators were wiped out by a ruthless enemy, and you barely managed to escape. You jumped blindly to another galaxy, hoping to find a safe haven. But fate was cruel, and you crashed on a barren world. Your ship is beyond salvage, but you survived the ordeal. It’s time to rebuild!

    You are basically an immobile mainframe, but you do have a few robots and lots of nanobots under your control. You command a few of them to scout the environment and look for resources. You start harvesting them, and before long, you have a new robot factory. You expand your sphere of influence, build some infrastructure and explore your new home.

    The idea is to build systems that build more systems. First, you’ll focus on doing low level stuff manually, but soon you’ll automate that. Then you’ll act as s manager of your robots for a while, before you can fully automate management. Then you’ll act as a CEO sort of figure for your bot factory, but eventually you’ll automate that too. Then you’ll command more and more resource extraction facilities and factories built, and then even that sort of expansion strategy gets automated. It’s just building nested automation all the way. Eventually, you’ll command a vast robot empire spanning several planets and perhaps even the whole galaxy. Hmm, I wonder if galactic conquest could be automated too…

    • that sounds great. abstractivus, the machine overlord.

    • I read not long ago, when looking at some theories of why we haven't found alien life yet and the Great Filter, something hypothesizing that ingelligent organic life might not be the "end state" in its own right, but rather the egg that hatches a new AI.

      In your game, it could be interesting encountering AIs created by different species, where the organic species no longer exist but the AIs they gave "birth" to did. I imagine there might be ways in which they are very different (in how they act/what they do) than a human-created AI.

      • Initially, the sentient machines would be like their designers. Once the machines are allowed to develop organically for several generations, they should be able to find their own way of doing things. For instance, in Matrix we saw machines that were thoroughly alien, because they were designed by machines.

        Many generations later, these machines might encounter machine descendants of another long lost biological empire. Would they be vastly different, or would they converge on the one obvious way of making sentient machines? Who knows. Galaxies and orbits tend to be disk shaped, because that’s the obvious stable configuration things gravitate towards. Maybe intelligence and sentience has to follow a similar force of nature, and therefore, convergences on just one successful configuration.

  • An eagle on the hunt simulator. Visualize the air currents for gliding, some kind of zoom and enhance to find prey, then guide the dive and extend claws at the right moment to refill the hunger meter.

  • I was talking about this just the other day as a joke.

    I would make "Car Simulator." It would simulate driving and working on a car exceptionally well. But the game itself would be basically Grand Theft Auto, just with much more realistic car control, modification and physics.

    Another, serious idea, I've been kicking around a while but am unsure how to actually do it is a game that captures the insanity of solving fictional problems with fictional solutions on Star Trek. Like a nebula is sapping energy from your ship, so you reconfigure the deflector to emit a neutron pulse or something. It would simulate science itself and create random elements and physics that the player would have to learn, understand, and can exploit. The key is that it's always new and different forcing every player, every new game to be creative in coming up with solutions to the random problem with equally random tools to promote critical thinking skills. I'm just not sure how to gamify "the scientific method" itself or I'd be actively working on making this a reality.

  • Currently started (at least somewhat) working on a submarine simulation/strategy game. I want it to be as lightweight as possible so it runs on as many systems as possible. Probably a lot of 2D graphics wherever graphics are necessary but a lot of focus will be on sensors and calculations. I want it to be Dieselpunkish with a technology tree between 1910s and 1960s but without featuring real world countries or submarines and no nuclear technology. The simulation of individual ships should be in depth in a dwarf fortress kind of way and I want realistic sound propagation. I’ll try to incorporate submarine design as well.

  • Probably just an improved version of EmuVR. Essentially it allows you to emulate games in a VR bedroom. It is limited to RetroArch systems but it would be really neat if I could smoothly play modern consoles or PC games with it.

    Even if it was a hacked together kind of way like using a capture card and something like XLink Kai to play together with someone else.

    I'm not sure if this is what you meant OP. I just like the idea of playing video games in a simulated room.

    Other than that maybe a Blockbuster owner? Recommending people movies and watching segments of films on the displays mounted to the roof sounds nice.

  • Walking in a forest simulator, it'll literally bw just that, a game where you walk in a forest with extremely realistic graphics and expertly crafted ambiance and sounds, would be the perfect game for me to relax with

  • I'd like to create a sim so immersive that it can't be distinguished from reality. Anybody who displays authoritarian tendencies would be forced to spend the rest of their lives playing that game, where they can be a bootlicker or a dictator without hurting anybody else.

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