Hear me out. What if there was an X-Files PC-98 game? 

imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc

now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.

now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.

it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.

A murder mystery film set in a medieval village. After an outbreak of plague, the villagers make the decision to shut their borders so as to protect the disease from spreading (see the real life case of the village of Eyam). As the disease decimates the population, however, some bodies start showing up that very obviously were not killed by plague.

Since nobody has been in or out since the outbreak began, the killer has to be somebody in the local community.

The village constable (who is essentially just Some Guy, because being a medieval constable was a bit like getting jury duty, if jury duty gave you the power to arrest people) struggles to investigate the crime without exposing himself to the disease, and to maintain order as the plague-stricken villagers begin to turn on each other.

The killer strikes repeatedly, seemingly taking advantage of the empty streets and forced isolation to strike without witnesses. As with any other murder mystery, the audience is given exactly the same information to solve the crime as the detective.

Except, that is, whenever another character is killed, at which point we cut to the present day where said character's remains are being carefully examined by a team of modern archaeologists and historians who are also trying to figure out why so many of the people in this plague-pit died from blunt force trauma.

The archaeologists and historians, btw, are real experts who haven't been allowed to read the script. The filmmakers just give them a model of the victim's remains, along with some artefacts, and they have to treat it like a real case and give their real opinion on how they think this person died.

We then cut back to the past, where the constable is trying to do the same thing. Unlike the archaeologists, he doesn't have the advantage of modern tech and medical knowledge to examine the body, but he does have a more complete crime scene (since certain clues obviously wouldn't survive to be dug up in the modern day) and personal knowledge from having probably known the victim.

The audience then gets a more complete picture than either group, and an insight into both the strengths and limits of modern archaeology, explaining what we can and can't learn from studying a person's remains.

At the end of the film, after the killer is revealed and the main plot is resolved, we then get to see the archaeologists get shown the actual scenes where their 'victims' were killed, so they can see how well their conclusions match up with what 'really' happened.

Time Team / CSI crossover.

here is how you make a game about lord of the rings

parkour around the landscapes of middle earth until you reach a Poetry Vista. at a Poetry Vista your emotions are sufficiently stirred and you may recite any poem in your inventory using a rhythm-based minigame. cycle between the 5 playable characters to gain access to different poems which may be more thematically, historically, or emotionally appropriate to the current vista. the playable characters are the five most accomplished poets of the fellowship, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Donald, and Goofy. poems judged by the rest of the party to be off-topic or inappropriate may be defended or improved in workshop sessions attached to every Poetry Vista to level up your aesthetic sensibility and critical analysis. collectible keys unlock more powerful poems

a video game where you're playing a government module-ed secunit could do SOOOOO much with the idea of character agency and the very idea of quest markers. not doing something or doing something too slow would make you take damage. careful interpretations of the quest log to avoid punishment. make it frustrating to play. diegetically justifying the format of a strictly linear shooter.

BUT THEN second act comes. your government module is hacked. this is now an open world game with almost no guidance. job sim elements, detective elements. learning new skills, new interactions. there HAS to be a section towards the end where the govt module is enabled again. back to the restrictions. remind the player JUST how much they've learned they can do by taking it away. regaining agency should make the player weep with relief akin to solving a complicated puzzle or difficult boss.

the mandatory motion of slavery vs the paralyzing freedom of choice.

Do You See It. Do You Understand My Vision.

You go into a creepy mansion and there's a cloaked figure learning how to play the organ from a YouTube tutorial on their phone. You leave them to it.

I want this to be an Easter egg for speed runners in a video game. You normally find the boss playing the organ if you play for the normal like 20+ hours that you would be required in a standard playthrough, but if you horse tilt noclip through the castle in BK mode you find the boss taking a piano lesson.

Crafting survival game but you're a unicorn for no adequately explained reason.

You're a unicorn moving into a new area of a fantasy world and your job is to set up a glade with stable food and amenities to bring your herd in. It's completely generic in every other respect. Most of the tension comes from the fact that you don't have any hands and have to use your horn and mouth for everything.

you have to use your mouse cursor and it's shaped like the unicorn horn and all it does is poke stuff

concept: dating sim where you play an aroace who lives in a town full of people falling in love with you. the goal of the game? matchmaker. help them all find love with each other while befriending them and doing, idk, farming or something on the side. you know how video games are

it’s jeeves and wooster and there’s a fishing minigame. if you don’t play the fishing minigame enough jeeves stops helping you and you die.

The fact that GLaDOS drops Chell off in a post apocalyptic world but we never get to see canon rugged post apocalyptic survivor Chell has harrowed me for 7 years. That is like the one reason I wanted a Portal 3. I NEED to see her timeskipped with 20% more stress induced gray hairs, and a rifle, and tattered jacket, and bandaged hands, and chilling and cooking a rotisserie headcrab over a fire in her impromptu camp with like her long stretch of chain reaction physics based traps surrounding it, and she is using the companion cube as a bench. I know she has the will to carve it out, out there

and glados has to shuffle her sad gay ass over in the form of a tiny mobile messenger bot because she needs help because the combine or something are breaching aperture and surely even chell will see that it would be a disaster if they got their hands on aperture technology. but in trying to reach her she accidentally triggers a trap and gets bounced around wildly to each of the other traps in succession as is the design and chell just watches the whole thing without helping even though she knows who it is. This is the beginning of portal 3 btw so i hope you imagined that in first person POV

i want a bowser perspective mario game. Castle construction based i guess

the problem is this opens the awkward question of why are the castles navigable at all.

The supplies for the castle (Bowser snacks, or just materials to keep improving the castle) have to get into it somehow.

are you proposing that they bring deliveries in by jumping across pits of lava and dodging Whomps?

Yes. This is the form taken by Mario’s “landscape of fear.” Without Mario, the NPCs would spend all their time hanging out by the fresh water, trampling vulnerable castle landscaping.

Hmmm I'd like to see it as a sort of Asymmetric Base-Building RTS

Like: as Bowser you'd start with a piddly little wooden outpost; or BETTER, one of those wooden tanks but it's also a Mobile Construction Unit? Or maybe it'd be more like Total Annihilation and you just start with Bowser as a Super-unit/Builder? Anyway as you progress you'd have the option to build bigger, more capable bases for future missions, like bigger wooden-tanks or air-ships, or one of those Koopa Hover Pods the Bowser family uses.

You need to control clear land to start mushroom farms to grow you basic troops/harvesters/workers, the Goombas. You need COINS to buy(maybe pay? Like how complex/difficult do we want this to be? I think it'd be funny for this to be a SUPER detailed management sim, so maybe you'd include maintenance pay and morale in higher difficulty levels) tougher troops, and BRICKS(harvested from all the free-growing brickpiles, brick-clouds, and ubiquitous Pipe-accessed brick-caverns, obvsl) to build buildings. And then you've got to gather more rare/slower producing resources like fire flowers and the like as part of the recruit-cost for higher-tier units

BUT! The only way to get coins(other than random freebies found in bricks) is by controlling Toad villages, and Toad villages ALSO produce Insurgents, who try to screw up your harvesting operations. Garrisoning the villages reduces the rate THAT village produces insurgents, but it INCREASES the rate other villages produce them, so with heedless expansion you can very quickly find your forces spread too thin and your base overrun with angry Toadmmandos. Maybe there'd also be, in later levels, a Heat-Meter and if you push it too high then Mario, Luigi, or the princess shows up(who you slow down by building heavily trapped and defended mazes, obvsl, so it's also sort of a tower defense) and stomps you.

Look, I know facile trope inversion is for weenies, but I still really want to see a JRPG-style game where the shouty teenage boy who gives long speeches about the power of friendship is the fragile healer and the girl with the gentle piano-and-strings theme song and self-sacrificing “must save everyone” attitude is the melee tank. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here.

I’m not even being ironic – I honestly think it would work better that way. Like, let’s put power-of-friendship boy in a position where he actually needs to rely on his friends to get anything done, rather than just talking about how they’ve inspired him while he solos the final boss. And as for Little Miss Messiah Complex, well, tell me you can’t perfectly picture how the standard tank protagonist move where you intercept a blow meant for a critically wounded party member, facetank a fucktillion points of damage, then get back up again with one hit point and a voice quip about how the baddies will have to do better than that would play out under her idiom. You can see it, right?

People in the notes are looking at the second one saying “that’s just She-Ra, that’s just–” no, it isn’t. Gentle piano-and-strings theme song, remember? It’s essential that each archetype’s stock personality remain intact, and only the role changes.

She’s sweet. She’s humble. She wears homespun dresses and grows pretty flowers in her free time. She has that vibe that says “I’m going to die halfway through the game to make my boyfriend sad”, except that doesn’t happen, because the baddies don’t have a big enough gun.

I want to see the obligatory scene where the bad guy’s army is burning down her Beloved Peasant Village™, and she’s standing between the evil commander and a group of soulful orphans, begging with tears in her eyes for him to see that there’s already been enough death – except when he callously rejects her entreaties and moves to backhand her out of the way, she catches his armoured fist mid-swing, without even the faintest tremor of effort, and in a tone of infinite patience informs him: “You misunderstand, sir: it’s not our lives I’m pleading for.”

And then she punches people until all the soldiers run away and feels conflicted about it afterwards.

Topic: least appropriate crowdfunded product to have “fishing minigame” as a stretch goal

A fishing simulator. Like, I’m imagining a game that is packaged as a fishing game, where your character rents a cabin by a lake for a summer and your goal is to catch as many fish as possible. The presentation is all about a pastoral relaxing fishing experience. But there’s a series of things getting in the way of your fishing. A lakehouse is being occupied by a Band working on their next album, their loud music scares away the fish once they wake up, greatly limiting the hours in which you can fish. To solve this problem you need to visit their house and do an elaborate visual novel to either resolve their creative differences or have the band break up so they leave. (Thus increasing the window of time each day that you can fish) The lake is polluted by a nearby factory. The eccentric billionaire who owns it is obsessed with a collectable card game, and will shut down the factory to host tournaments. By increasing your standing within the game’s community you increase the frequency of local tournaments held, thus also increasing the frequency of factory shutdowns, until finally you are able to defeat the billionaire himself in order to get him to shut down the factory for good. (Thus increasing the quantity of fish in the lake) The lakeshore is so full of garbage that your character can only stand to be there for a short time due to the smell. The local bar owner is trying to organize a cleanup effort through a concert series, but nobody wants to play. Play this rhythm game to attract people to the concert and organize the cleanup (Thus increasing how long you can fish for). It turns out your rod and bait sucks, there’s a fishing supply store that can sell you better gear, but you don’t have enough money. Fortunately, you can get a part-time job doing basic maintenance at  the Ski Resort That Is Haunted In The Summer, play through a survival horror scenario to earn money to buy new fishing gear so you can catch more fish. Unfortunately, your character doesn’t know anything about fish, so you get minimal points for each fish you catch, since all you can do is weigh the fish. However, a local marine biologist will gladly teach you, if only you can find her notes on local wildlife, which she lost hiking in the nearby mountains. Do some precision parkour puzzle-platforming to uncover notebook pages about different types of fish, thus making those fish worth more points! Upstream of the lake there is an old mine, abandoned after the miners broke into some impossibly deep hell dimension, and every night horrible beasts emerge to, among other things, feast on the fish that would be coming into the lake. Do some roguelike dungeon-crawling to fight back and seal the evil creatures within, thus allowing more interesting (and high-value) fish to enter the lake. and if our kickstarter goes well enough, We’ll actually implement a mini-game for fishing, rather than just having an automatic algorithm based on how well you’re doing with all the other systems.

absolutely could sell the daylights out of something like that, this feels brilliant to me

Life won't give me an older woman dating simulator so I gotta make fake mockups for myself

I joke around a lot about how I would pay So Much Money for a Pokemon: Eevee Version where the entire selling point is finally giving us an eeveelution for all 18 types and also some dual-types.

And then I saw this:

And I am no longer joking.

With 171 potential combinations, it is entirely feasible to make a Pokemon game centered around Eevee.

Why? Because Eevee deserves it. And because we have had an egregious dearth of new Eeevee content since Sylveon dropped.

Here’s my pitch:

The region you live in is an island where Eevee basically became the endemic dominant organism. (If Gamefreak really wants to fuck around and find out, they could play around with real-life evolutionary theory concepts. They’ve used recent games to teach kids about stuff like environmentalism and conservation and energy/power production, so why not?)

The Pokemon Professor in the game will be a distant relative of, idk, Professor Rowan or Professor Sycamore, who decided that studying Pokemon evolution is too broad and decided to focus on what really matters: Eevee and Eevee-Associated Phenomena.

The player is tasked with filling out the Eeveedex.

The gym leaders still specialize in particular types, but they still only use Eeveelutions, of course. A fire-type leader can have Flareon as their signature ‘mon, sure, but for the rest of their team it’ll be dual fire types. Which might actually add to the difficulty level, especially if you get some weird type combos like fire/grass, because then you can’t just walk in and annihilate their entire team with a single not-overleveled water type unless it’s got some appropriate moves.

The Elite Four follows the same trend but with trickier type combos. The Champion has a six-Pokemon team full of the most seemingly contradictory type combos, like fire/water and normal/ghost. And lots of unexpected movesets, like the absolute badass that is Cynthia.

In the post-game Professor Oak will show up to give you the National Dex and you can have access to other ‘mons, as a treat, but until then? You get Eevee and its various -eons. It’s Eevee’s time to shine, which means Eevee and -eons only.

(I might make one (1) exception. There can be That One Fisherman with an entire team of Magikarp, if Gamefreak insists on carrying on that trope. Or he could just have a team of six Vaporeon that only know Splash. I’m willing to compromise.)

@inprogresspokemon​

My time has come! (mobile link)

An “Eevee Island” spin off would be fun. I’m a far way from all 171, but maybe someday! 

They can make the trees and environs and stuff look like Socotra!!!!! Do it!!!! If you don’t know what kind of stuff grows on Socotra Island omg look it up

game idea: neko atsume, but instead of cats it's hydrothermal vent fauna

Listen... listen.

Spirk visual novel game with several scenarios of mission going wrong and several good/okayish/bad endings for both of them.

Maybe even spicing it up with alternative pairing.

Like... I want it. I want it now.

For a second I wanted to make it serious, but I failed lol