TL;DR Something like Kerbal Space Program but with a bigger emphasis on setting up interplanetary logistics and colonies and an eventual win-state.

So, the premise is that you are the overmind for a race of eusocial cephalopods that live on an Enceladus/Europa like icy moon orbiting a gas giant. You’ve got the beginnings of a space program using the fact that your workers can survive in hard vacuum for a short time so you can build and send rockets up (easy due to the lack of an atmosphere and small gravity well) filled with eggs and plan manoeuvre nodes where an egg will hatch giving you temporary control of the craft for the life of the current worker (you can also hatch an egg on an ad-hoc basis but carefully planning missions is encouraged as, without other life support, the mass of the eggs is the primary payload mass that determines your delta-v).

You start off low on metal to create rockets (probably a starting stockpile + a very slow trickle auto-mined from your home moon to prevent softlocks) but a metal-rich asteroid has recently been captured as a submoon to your home moon. So your initial goal is to use your starting metal to build something capable of reaching this submoon, mining it, and getting back home to give you more metal to create bigger rockets to explore the rest of the starting gas giant moon system.

You can also start setting up experiments on the different moons and in orbit + a communication satellite infrastructure to get the data back home to start working your way through a tech tree giving you access to more components to build rockets from, more experiments to set up to bring in science faster and, in particular, electronic control systems that allow you to automate parts of the launch/manoeuvre process to break your dependency on the egg hatching mechanic (although these would only work in areas of space you’ve already visited manually to keep that mechanic working for exploration)

At some point, you unlock the ability to set up colonies on different bodies which allow you to automatically mine resources, build rockets in different places and start to use the automation tech to move it autonomously between orbits and ultimately between colonies. Setting up and expanding colonies would require a resource only available on bodies with a thick atmosphere (of which there would be one in your starting gas giant moon system + a standalone planet that’s harder to reach at first but doesn’t require you to climb out of the gas giant gravity well to help you expand out into the rest of the solar system) in order to make you still have to face the challenges of getting a rocket out of an atmosphere and/or let you play with SSTO space planes etc.

The point of all this would be to ultimately collect and ship enough resources to start putting together components for a big colony ship that would have to be built in sufficiently big colonies on specific types of bodies and then hauled to the edge of the solar system for construction. You’d then be able to send the fully built ship off into interstellar space and “win”.

Also, use n-body physics (potentially a restricted form so the planetary orbits are stable and it only applies to your rockets/satellites/stations) to let super-nerds set up ITN style low energy transfer orbits passing through Lagrange points because why the fuck not. It’s a fair amount of extra work for a fairly niche use-case but you did say no compromises.

KSP + minecraft create aeronautics + factorio Need i say more?

Bloodborne 3.

Tyranny 2

I will call it prime minister.

The player plays the role of a prime minister running a country leading a team - played by AI agents - of staffers. You start by talking about your ideal government, and the game builds an organization that suits.

It’s simCountry but very little clicking.

Each ‘day’ starts with a verbal briefing over zoom with your staff. They tell you what’s going on and then you tell everyone what to do.

They probably do it.

It probably has an effect, largely dictated by studies and historical record.

You can fire the ones who suck.

You have a court system and some senator-types who are largely NPCs but have themes and goals like planetary advisors of old space planetary management sims.

You don’t know who’s lying, you don’t know who’s effective, you don’t know what her the approval numbers are honest.

If you get too bad or you offend a whackadoo cult you get Kirked or Nixoned. It’s all a turn-based thing where the entire interface is you talking into a zoom call - with admins, with talk show hosts, with your spies.

Good luck, Senor Presidente. Try not to get “recalled” or accidentally discover socialism.

Primary gameplay loop of FTL: Faster Than Light, but an overall structure and writing of a Fallout game.

Instead of leveling up an individual persons skills and gear you’re hiring crew and equipping a ship, which you manage by manning stations etc.

Visitors

You’re a the leader of an alien race roaming the universe in search of sentience. You arrive to Earth and your projections see that human life will perish in less than 100 years unless humans revert the damage to the planet.

You explain this. You promise amazing tech and knowledge if the changes start happening. Nothing changes in the first year. In fact, trillionaires push through social media and the news outlets scream about the danger of “the alien woke mind virus” and people starts hating you.

Your mission, through draconian and inapelable actions, is to decimate the power of trillionaires, redistribute wealth, ensure all countries have progressive governments which promote education, science and general prosperity. Violent, backward, antiscience countries, regardless of their former power, must get removed from the political scene so the more humane, friendly, humanitarian countries start collaborating in improving the world.

It would be a total commercial failure, but what a notion.

My design path started from the idea of “An open world game, with a chain to keep you broadly on a certain path”. So you can explore, but should never go TOO far from your moving “home point”.

I’m sure many gamers will decry not having total freedom to go anywhere, but I’ve found some of the best stories in games do require some restriction on player freedom. So, yknow, live with it.

The basic idea I have is of a woman in love with a traveling doctor, who falls ill, and enters a coma. She loads him into a small wheeled caravan, and starts a journey across open lands, initially to locate another doctor familiar with his condition, but then eventually to verse herself in experimental medicine enough to cure him herself. On the way, she learns basic swordfighting, other strange recipes and brews, and meets a variety of societies; some great, some selfish. There’s heartbreak and sacrifice, but in the end the Doctor is cured from his coma.

A social media game that rewards players for demonstrating they they read the entire item they’re commenting on and they understand what it says.

It’s an over complicated mess.

A roleplaying game where each person can build their own world with its own mechanics and aesthetics.

Within the world, the leader gets to build the economy, deciding how players can trade and how they’re taxed. As well as getting to build he aesthetic, deciding what the ecology is like, what races and species exist, etc. and the very laws of physics, deciding what combat is like if it can even happen at all, and how players can build within their world.

Then there’s some form of optional inter-world mechanics where there can be trade or war.

So everyone has the option to just ostrich unto their own ideal world or live inside someone else’s world. You can just make yourself the absurdly OP god of you world with a class that’s exclusive to you and stay there all the time, or you can build somehow elaborate and fair that brings a lot of other people in.

Having more people participating in your world would translate to more power in the interworld mechanics, and the leaders in those mechanica get to have the most influence over how they work.

It’s a game build by its players that grows and evolves over time eventually containing its own history that the players created.

Idk, somewhere on some machine I have like 40 pages of thoughts on how this would work that are now well lost.

But I think it’d be kinda cool… if impossible to build and hopeless to fairly maintain

Two options: The Elder Scrolls level open world with BG3 level writing (incl. branching paths and party members) (and add some better realtime gameplay in the mix too), or a BeamNG / My Summer Car style realistic vehicle sim with a Kenshi style open world and survival elements (imagine you’ve got a mission involving a faction far away, but midway there the check engine light lights up and it’s becoming nighttime…)

I’d want to do a near remake of Deus Ex, the original, with the first person interactive simulation aspects and role playing, but set in the Murderbot Diaries universe. You get to play another recently freed security unit and need to escape to some outer rim world. Maybe Preservation Alliance? Maybe you’ll do some good along the way.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

Picture this:

Side-scrolling/three-quarter perspective, SNES or Genesis era Vampire game. The game is very high contrast, to let you play with light and shadows.

The game starts with you getting bit by a vampire. The goal is to find and kill the vampire who bit you to avoid becoming one yourself. You have to fight your way through various monsters, like vampire underlings, familiars, etc., with mini-bosses sprinkled throughout.

As you progress through the game, you slowly develop vampire powers as you’re turning. You get stronger, faster, learn to fly or transform into animals… whatever. You can slow the progress by hanging out in sunlight, drinking holy water, eating garlic, etc. However, you can also speed up the progress to become more powerful by hanging out in shadows, drinking blood, or handling cursed items.

At the end of the game, your character decides whether to kill the vampire or embrace the lifestyle, depending on how far your transition has progressed throughout the game.