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[Scoops Novel]

What would be your unconventional use? *running for shelter*

[Draco18s]

What would be your unconventional use? *running for shelter*

*Snorts*

[Tsuchigumo550]

I want an Eldritch horror styled game based on dreams.

The basic plot:
You live in a borading-school like high school, complete with dorms, a gym and track, a nearby town within walking distance, and everything you need to live alone- which is good, because you are alone. You've no relatives to speak of, in fact, the only one you've ever known was your mother. She had always been frail and sickly, bud had never let it stop her. Unfortunately, it kept trying until it took her life, leaving you nowhere to go- until you were swept up and sent to Governess High.

You've been here for a year now, a junior, and have made friends and enemies. You only really care for a small group of people, the center of which is your girlfriend. You are very close to her, and she to you.

She's the only other person to know about the dreams.

The dreams. Your eternal torment ever since you lost your mother. Every night, the field of grey wheat, the floating girl you can't remember anything about, the mouth in the ground that eats you. The one you have no control over. You've seen a psyche. They can't figure it out. You've seen doctors: they tell you that your dream isn't possible: you bolt right awake after a second of complete loss of brain activity. You've given up on ever losing the nightmares, and instead focus on the waking hours of your life- long classes, managing money for food, and your girlfriend and her curves. You feel your days are hectic enough.

You haven't got the slightest idea what your life really is.

Spoiler: I'm making a suggestion game so don't read if you're interested. (click to show/hide)

The supernatural has a grip on you, your bloodline, and your entire life. Things start happening, then things go wrong. You won't ever figure out exactly what- losing track of what is who, who is what, and what is real, and then, depending on your actions in the dreams, the end will come.

[Neonivek]

So... Slice of Life meets horror huh?

[Korbac]

I've probably mentioned this before, but here it is again (in case I ever find the time to try and make the damned thing myself) - a pokemon game where you start out as a trainer, and work your way up to become the owner of a multi - billion dollar pokemon - related business, e.g. a pokemart chain, selling trainer goods and accessories, a pokecenter chain, where either the trainers pay you for healing or the nebulous entity known as the government pays you for each 'mon healed, or the head of a stable of trainers, which can be used for a variety of things, for example, competing in pro tournaments, security hire, etc. You could run a daycare chain and offer breeding services to trainers. Or, less nobly, you could become the next team rocket, robbing banks using mons or smuggling rare mons / selling their meat and eggs for high prices. All of these options would be able to be combined, so your health service could be a front for your criminal activities perhaps.

The battle system would probably not be as fleshed out as the one pokemon probably uses, but pokemon to trainer relationships will be important, as well as trainer - trainer (important when you're hiring someone, especially if they are high up in the company or doing illicit things.) Public perception could also be important. Your character would level up as things got done to make him better with business, pokemon, and people, and each of the businesses would have some sort of 'tech tree' that you paid to work your way through. Ultimately, it would be a turn - based game, which would potentially allow for multiplayer and some interesting scenarios (Player 1's Private PokePolice Force would contend with Player 2's Smugglers, for example.)

The first company I'd run would probably be some sort of pokeball - courier trading service, as I've often been annoyed at my inability to get my Haunter or my Kadabra to evolve. XD

Ran out of my train of thought for a moment, I'll probs add more to this in a minute.

[Parsely]

I want an Eldritch horror styled game based on dreams.

The basic plot:
You live in a borading-school like high school, complete with dorms, a gym and track, a nearby town within walking distance, and everything you need to live alone- which is good, because you are alone. You've no relatives to speak of, in fact, the only one you've ever known was your mother. She had always been frail and sickly, bud had never let it stop her. Unfortunately, it kept trying until it took her life, leaving you nowhere to go- until you were swept up and sent to Governess High.

You've been here for a year now, a junior, and have made friends and enemies. You only really care for a small group of people, the center of which is your girlfriend. You are very close to her, and she to you.

She's the only other person to know about the dreams.

The dreams. Your eternal torment ever since you lost your mother. Every night, the field of grey wheat, the floating girl you can't remember anything about, the mouth in the ground that eats you. The one you have no control over. You've seen a psyche. They can't figure it out. You've seen doctors: they tell you that your dream isn't possible: you bolt right awake after a second of complete loss of brain activity. You've given up on ever losing the nightmares, and instead focus on the waking hours of your life- long classes, managing money for food, and your girlfriend and her curves. You feel your days are hectic enough.

You haven't got the slightest idea what your life really is.

Spoiler: I'm making a suggestion game so don't read if you're interested. (click to show/hide)

The supernatural has a grip on you, your bloodline, and your entire life. Things start happening, then things go wrong. You won't ever figure out exactly what- losing track of what is who, who is what, and what is real, and then, depending on your actions in the dreams, the end will come.

If I were directing a game such as this, I'd say the girlfriend part is a bad touch. Its better to cultivate that feeling of isolation. You should make the protagonist a student at a university instead. Better to avoid the wangst and stick to horror. Its probably just a matter of personal taste.

[Neonivek]

If I were directing a game such as this, I'd say the girlfriend part is a bad touch. Its better to cultivate that feeling of isolation. You should make the protagonist a student at a university instead. Better to avoid the wangst and stick to horror. Its probably just a matter of personal taste.

Sometimes the best way to foster the sense of isolation is to do the exact opposite. To foster the sense of being together with someone only to have the chair pulled from under you at a later point.

As for "Wangst" if I was making the game and kept the Wangst I'd make it the point and have this be more of a psychological horror game. Where the creatures and events resemble more mundanities taken to the next level.

[MrWiggles]

I like the idea of God games where one can create and do anything. I think that's an awesome role playing game.

This is called programming.

[MrWiggles]

Double Post, HO.

So this is my draft of how to work tech tree for a 4X game.

I was thinking of having 'Understandings' and 'Applications'.

Understanding would be what techs are, and Applications are things you get to do. (City Improvements, Units, Unit equipments, Terrain Improvement.)

Applications dont have a one to one relation with Understandings. Instead, Applications are unlocked through a combination of Understandings, with multiple sets of Understanding to unlock th same Application.

I was also thinking of having Understanding having a time out feature, where they're passively researched. Like, even if your Civ never invested in Industrial Farming, you're still going to get Industrial Farming anyway. But I dont want this to be as good as actually investing into it.

I also thinking of letting you change your focus at several junction points. For Civ, that would be different Eras, but I'm not sure on that.

I dont know what to do about Tech Stealing though.

[Tsuchigumo550]

If I were directing a game such as this, I'd say the girlfriend part is a bad touch. Its better to cultivate that feeling of isolation. You should make the protagonist a student at a university instead. Better to avoid the wangst and stick to horror. Its probably just a matter of personal taste.

Sometimes the best way to foster the sense of isolation is to do the exact opposite. To foster the sense of being together with someone only to have the chair pulled from under you at a later point.

As for "Wangst" if I was making the game and kept the Wangst I'd make it the point and have this be more of a psychological horror game. Where the creatures and events resemble more mundanities taken to the next level.

She's an integral part of the story- ill elaborate later

[itisnotlogical]

A game that is essentially reverse Grand Theft Auto, where you play as an invisible guardian angel watching over a city or small town. Disasters, crimes and tragedies can happen every day at any time, so you have to be constantly ready to save lives. Although you are invisible, you are tangible and can influence the world in subtle or drastic ways. For example, you can break down a woman's car so that they bump into their ex, which causes them to reunite and prevents spiraling depression on the part of either. You can seize control of a car if the driver is asleep at the wheel, swerving them off the road instead of in to traffic. You can also immediately kill somebody if you need to stop a murder right away, but this incurs a small penalty, thus encouraging subtlety and planning.

Each NPC has a distinct personality and history that can be viewed at any time like Dwarf Fortress characters, and you can also stalk them to learn more about them. For example, you can watch over a single mother living in poverty, find out what you need to do to help them, and then execute your plan. Not everybody will be apparently deserving of your help and it's just you out there, so sometimes you have to make a choice between saving an asshole's life right now or making a one-time opportunity to steer somebody's life on to a better path. There's no "good" or "bad" endings/perks/upgrades, so it's an organic choice on the part of the player.

[Starver]

(Long response to MrWiggles, two three posts ago, now.)

How about Understandings having a magnitude (or an analogue of magnitude from "Farming" being superseded by "Farming2", except... well... better).  ((Or, indeed both.  "Harvesting" perhaps being level 1, "subsistence farming" for level 2, "social farming" (needs a better name) further up, then onwards until "industrial farming" (which in this example I'm claiming as an "understanding" name) and perhaps beyond, but, again, each level having its own magnitude on top of the basic presence of the Understanding.))

The tech Applications require certain degrees of a certain number of Understandings.  "Mechanised Farming" as an Application requires either the Industrial Farming Understanding or perhaps several of the higher-level farming Understandings to various degrees (plus whatever non-farming Understandings allow tractors, etc) and gets a bonus to effectiveness for the sum of the excess degrees that you have above the basic number necessary in the spec[1].  (I could envisage the spread of these excesses dictating the nature of the bonus[2].  An excess in the Farming area would perhaps give an increase in yield, while an excess in the tractor-esque Understanding(s) would give an increase in speed of harvesting.  Surprising bonuses could be implemented by setting a certain farming-type Application to 'require' chemical engineering at level zero, but for each excess level you get a fertiliser/pest-control bonus to production.  It need not be publicised as "needs zero levels", even, but with higher levels of Farming Applications having a non-zero requirement it would effectively mean an early adoption of that aspect of ancillary farm-tech is rewarded without actually being required, just yet.)

Without the 'tractor-factor', whatever that might be in terms of Understandings, your Industrial Farming Understanding would still be useful, albeit in a form of farming that still involves manual labour (with an army of farm-hands producing high yields on the land), because there'd be an Application tuned to that, as well.  Perhaps requiring something like Socialist Ideals or Enforced Feudalism behind it, of course, to the appropriate degree (and probably some suitably attuned social settings for your little empire).


As with the Great Library wonder of Civ fame (but automatically, although doubtless augmented by some cultural exchange institute or other, as well as spy networks and intellectual treaties with friends), higher level Understandings (or higher levels of an understanding) could leak into your civilisation (and leak out by similar means, of course, whether you like it or not, although you'd have a limited capability to stem the flow according to various policies).  It would thus be inevitable that any nation-group (or however you organise players/NPCs, e.g. homeworlds) that were not totally isolationist could gain some higher level of farming (though not up to the level of those who were advancing that tech) even if they'd been mostly concentrating on some other field (NPI!) of technological improvement unless they'd stagnated long enough in that field for you to catch up and be their equal, by which time every farm-idle civ would probably have the same base Understanding cohort.


And then, at the other 'end' of the tech-level spectrum, how about Applications also having an upper limit to some Understanding levels?  Your manually-powered Industrial Farming-led Application which benefits from your Socialism/Feudalism/whatever is cut-off from use as some other social-upheaval Understanding, as the people no longer want to be slaves to agriculture.  This could be done by degrees...  As the City Living Understanding (if that's one of the 'poison in the chalice' items) is developed in order to sustain a burgeoning industrial revolution in other areas of the tech-tree, each level increases the cost of maintaining the army of labourers that you need, thus making this form of farming impractical and requiring you to quicken development of less labour-intensive means.

(Or... to extend the example further either an Understanding or a social factor that allows Immigrant Workers to happen can factor in (amongst many other things it does) an offset to this penalty... but by now I can see that I'm already over-writing just this one branch of possibly tech applications, so Gods know how much effort you'd want to put in to tune a complete structural system with all these additions and caveats!)

So, anyway... feel free to pluck out any bits you like.  If any!



[1] If you want it to be more complicated (fakeedit: hah! ...I wrote this before I did go more complicated with the last few paragraphs!) the spec could include "foo>1, bar>2, foo+bar>4", so "foo=2, bar=2" is valid, as is "foo=1, bar=3", but not "foo=1, bar=2" or even "foo=3, bar=1"...  (This might also mean you can set a variable-makeup Application to be "FooA>0, FooB>0, BarA>0, BarB>0, BarC>0, FooA+FooB>1, BarA+BarB+BarC>2", allowing either FooA or FooB to be the 'Fooish' requirement, and any two of BarA, BarB and BarC.  Assuming you'd also accept two levels of any single Bar, also[1a]. )

[1a] "min(BarA,1)+min(BarB,1)+min(BarC,1)>2"?  In the game internals, that'd work with an appropriate parse-friendly structure to associate with each research object, but starting to get messy from the player's POV if you're trying to convey this information to them at all without a freetext description of the requirements tagged into the research management system.

[2] Additional fakeedit: with reference to the above footnote, I'd make the "excess levels bonus" countable from the individual minimums, so [2+2] means an automatic foo-bonus, while [1+3] makes an automatic bar-bonus.  This would straight away 'flavour' the nature of the Application to whichever of the requirements you "made up to excess" in order to arrive at the sum total part of the spec.  Whether you'd grant these bonuses special status (attain a pest-control bonus on gaining such a dependent farming Application and you get a permanent buff factor on top for all future stages, but attain the speed bonus and that is made into a permanent buff... mutually exclusive, of course, unless the engine allows simultaneous advancements[3]) or just allow the hypothetical next development towards [2+3] (one level of buff for each, now) absorb the benefit, I don't know...  It's not my system, so do as you think best.

[3] I don't think it should.  Even if you strive to simultaneously obtaining a further level of foo the one from a university exchange program with the Fooier civilisation while your spies bring back the next level of bar from the Barier one, I say that it should be a pot luck choice as to which happened, or else you'd also have to consider closely-timed occurrences.   See, even more complicated!

[Alkhemia]

A new vigilante 8 or even a HD collection 
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RlQruGNZEs

[Euld]

A 4x space game where a simulated world (complete with NPC empires, procedurally generated quests, NPCs with hopes and dreams and goals to conquer the galaxy, along with ancient secrets of the past that could threaten or save the galaxy, and outer-dimensional horrors threatening the galaxy...) runs and you are free to involve yourself at any level at any time.  Tired of running the entire empire?  Scale down to a simple, lonely freighter captain.  Settle down on a colony world, start a family, bring peace and prosperity to the planet they settle on as a leader in the community.  When a war threatens the colony, scale up to the RTS or turn based strategy mode and fight in a space battle to keep the colony safe.  Dislike how the empire is being run?  Scale back up to full on empire mode and show them how it's done.

[JanusTwoface]

After seeing this post on Kotaku about a new Stargate SG-1 game, I'm reminded that I'd really like to see a game set in the Stargate universe (although probably not in Stargate Universe) with X-COM (the original) style tactical missions and tactical / geoscape split. Particularly if you could add in some sort procedurally generated worlds to reach via the Stargate.