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.
I read an idea a long while back that I'll repeat:
A spy game in the style of Splinter Cell, except you aren't the guy, you're his handler. You tell him "crawl under that laser," or "wait a moment, there's a guard... okay now go!" or "input the following sequence to disable the doomsday device," and he more or less listens to what you tell him to do. The issue is that the more you fuck up and get him hurt or killed, the less likely he is to listen to you. So you have to build up a relationship with your spy by giving him good instructions in a timely fashion and getting him to complete missions successfully. Over the course of the game, as you progress, you'd be able to tell him to do more dangerous things because he'd trust you more. Playing the game successfully would make you feel like you and your spy were a well-oiled machine, working together to take down supervillains and criminal syndicates.
Even more interesting... Imagine a 2 player co-op game. The "spy" player is playing a tactical fps, but has no minimap or enemy detection. The "handler" player is patched into all the security cameras and tells the spy where to go and where the enemies are.
Well I have great news for you. That game already exists. Look up Operation Tango.
Oh damn. I just looked it up and it seems like fun. Now if only I had any friends....
Look up black hat cooperative! It's vr but sounds pretty similar to what you after describing.
I don't have VR, but that sounds cool. Actually the thing that came to mind when I was describing it was "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes"
That actually exists. Operation Tango if I recall correctly.
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.
I never expected to find the idea of a game based on finding utilities underground to be exciting but you did it. I'm in.
If only I had the time to learn game programming. And art, and music, and...basically everything.
I could be rich!
A few things to remember to add:
False positives
Abandoned utilities
Utility maps and GPS coords that were never made, were never updated, or are flat out wrong
Contractors who will make every excuse and lie about what happened
Random people asking if your digging for gold and worried if you're going to tear up their lawn
Yeah, reading about these things are what made me realize how layered the game could be.
You could have a lying contractor who kicked dirt over your marks, and whether you would get the blame or not would depend on screenshots you took of your work beforehand XD
From a technical perspective, I bet programming abandoned utilities and how those impact detection would be a challenge for the programmers interested in the "simulation" part. I bet there's some math going on there!
Lmao this is hilarious. You could also throw in kids from the neighborhood stealing the little red flags 🚩 that are left in the ground for marking digs
This is a genuinely great idea. I've been playing Dave the Diver and I can see this having a similar level of management, slowly introducing you to the new roles - first you're just marking, and over time you're managing more and more of the whole process and earning money on the way.
Heaps of room for cool visuals like revealing the pipes you find, cutscenes showing work done/completed.
Love it! 100% would play this.
Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world
I would love this, put on an audiobook, get stoned, and drive around the alps or Southeast Asia. No traffic and no danger
Alps? No traffic? Mate, have you ever tried crossing the Alps during holiday season?
Nope! But why would they program the traffic into such a simulation?
Realism!
what if they made it multiplayer
I would not play such a game
The closest thing to that would probably be euro truck simulator 2
City Car Driving exists, but I don’t know how extensive it is. You can also install mods on ETS2 to drive around in normal cars.
I tried that on my steam deck, controller support is non existent from when I last played
Id say closest game right now is assetto Corsa with mods
Ets2 has trucks, even if you mod a car in it still feels and drives like a truck
I want to rip it around my home town in a fast car, swerving through traffic lool
Isn't there a thing on Google earth where you can sorta do that?
A modern version of the 1998 Sierra game with real world data would be great. I spent so much time in the freedrive mode on that back in the day.
I think I remember an aeroplane in Google earth lol
I know there's a very basic version of this online somewhere, you can drive a car on top of Google maps satellite view
Just wait for content creators to play this drunk
Beam.ng has some pretty good maps where you can just drive around. They aren’t quite fleshed out as much but there’s a ton of mods too so you might be able to find one that’s just a Sunday driver.
I'd say assetto Corsa is better right now, beamng feels like a crash simulator or even just a scene creator rather than a proper driving sim
In asetto Corsa I can get real world cars in real world maps and drive it around
I’d like a realistic ecosystem simulator where it isn’t from a human perspective. Like, maybe you start as a beaver and build a damn and it changes your river and has lots of effects on other species. Maybe then you switch to a bear and eat a salmon. Does a bear shit in the woods? It does! And it helps the trees.
As a non realistic version, have you played timber born? It's about beavers making dams and towns, but very much not realistic.
Excavation Simulator.
Just put all resources into simulating dirt well, then make a game about driving various power equipment. A sandbox game, where you just build whatever you want. VR would be fun.
Actually, I was recently thinking of gravel pit simulator. It's be like a farming sim, you'd buy various equipment and use them to move dirt separating gravel and selling it to get money to buy better requirements.
That’s be great. It would be especially cool if you could simulate gravel, with all its friction and inertia and everything. And then somehow make that same model handle everything down to the molecular sheets of clay.
I bet that model would be mind expanding to build
Not quite the same, but Snowrunner does detailed mud simulation well... and you get to drive various vehicles through it
I’ve played it a bit. The winch cables are a lot of fun
The game 'Captain of Industry' isn't a simulator, but it did come to mind when reading this comment. Kinda like cities skylines but with a heavy focus on excavation. There's one map where I spent hours excavating a path up a mountainside to escape the starting area.
I've had this one in my head because I genuinely thought it existed.
Tank Crew Simulator. It's like Fury where you're in a little tank with three other guys. Your view of the world is through a tiny slit in the metal or if you decide you want to risk getting your head blown off, you can open your hatch. If you're the loader, make sure the main gun operator has a round loaded into the cannon. If you're driving, don't be that guy who runs over an anti-tank mine. As the gunner, it's your duty to keep your head connected to your shoulders.
You could do that in the original Operation Flashpoint. Don't think there was a loader, though.
Planetside 2 also has a lot of things like that. Not a loader, but most vehicles have separate drivers and gunners (with a few exceptions).
It would actually make a good VR game you could play sitting in a chair
I just want a life sim with reasonably believable NPCs. Dwarf Fortress is the only game I've seen really attempt something like this, where NPCs act intelligently, and you can ask them about topics and events dynamically.
Essentially, I want a game where the NPCs are capable of doing everything the player can, so I could start a shop and give out quests myself, if I want.
I've actually been "working" on a project like this. It's a huge undertaking, but who knows, maybe I'll get there one day.
I wonder if AI's like ChatGTP make this more achievable
I've thought a lot about that. I think it definitely does, but I also think there's a lot of unfulfilled potential left in more "traditional" AI.
There are pros and cons to the GPT approach, with down-sides such as the (current) limit on the context, and difficulty establishing consistent "facts". These are generally outweighed by the obvious up-sides, but a GPT-based AI will feel different than a more hard-coded one.
All this to say: There will be a hundred better GPT-based games released before I can ever hope to release my project.
Oh, also: the way I'm writing my project, I'm intentionally making the AI modular, so I can "slot in" something like ChatGPT and play around with that.
Yes... But actually no.
ChatGPT is amazing for generating reasonable-sounding prose. That means you can have an NPC say things that largely make sense... If you know what they need to say.
For instance, let's say you ask an NPC for directions to the mayor's house. In this scenario, you need your NPC to
Parse and understand the player's speech. (This is a question. The question is about reaching a location. The location is the mayor's house.)
Modeling the NPC's knowledge. (Does this NPC know where the mayor lives? Do they know someone else who does?)
Disambiguating conversation. (Do we have a mayor? Are they asking about our mayor, or - from context- someone in a different town?)
Constructing an answer. (Left, right, right, straight...)
Converting the answer to a conversational tone. (Well, if ya' head south down wewhauken, turn right on glottis st...)
Chat GPT solves #5 for sure. But 1-4 are...iffy. Sometimes, you can give Chat GPT a list of factoids and it'll reply with the data you gave it. Other times it'll "hallucinate" an answer, especially if a player asks something you didn't expect. (And people will definitely come up with stuff you don't expect.)
Still, LLMs do solve a really hard piece of the dynamic-NPC puzzle. I'm sure we'll see them in use. It's just not necessarily even the hardest part of this problem.
On a similar note, middle management simulator
It better have a middle management manager sitting at their desk playing the middle management simulator.
You have to simulate a metropolitan police department for a futuristic city. You have to maintain funding by making sure neighborhoods and districts are safe. There would be side missions where you take out the local gangs in that area, discover that there's a evil, crime syndicate that's manipulating crime within the city. You have to capture, interrogate, and decide to either charge someone or let them go. Your actions determine what kind of department you run. Are you corrupt? Are you by the books? Do you inspire people to do better, or do you strike fear in the citizens of your city. It'd be completely open world, you'd control your department on an overhead map, assign cops certain roles or positions at certain locations. You maintain relationships with your cops, and you have to go home daily, and hope your second in command is up to the tasks of maintaining things without you. You also have to contend with corrupt cops and corrupt politicians that provide your funding. Do you risk losing funding and your position? Or do you make your citizens proud by upholding the law?
Unionization simulator. Talk to coworkers, see who is supportive. Risk revealing too much to soon to someone who runs to the bosses.
Also strike simulator as a sequel.
Revolution simulator for the trilogy.
I've wanted to create a game that's a simulation of mental health issues. For instance, youre playing someone who has autism. You turn to walk down a street. Turn to look, touch, car crash horns, screaming. Touch a wall, textures explode, patterns etching into your outstretched arm. Or, one about ptsd. Another about auditory processing disorder.
My IRL reality can be so hypervivid, intense, super saturated, surreal. Often wish someone else could experience it, know what it's like.
Senuas sacrifice is that specifically about schizophrenia I believe
In college I made a game called Freefall Simulator. The idea was to make a game with the goal of making the player motion sick, as if they were falling.
It worked, a little too well.
I had to play it for hours on end.
You were ahead of your time. Turns out, motion sickness simulations became so popular, that companies started building hardware specifically for it.
I've thought about how fun and nauseating it would be on VR, NGL
I can see that as the logical conclusion of your game. You really should make the ultimate vomit cannon like that. Maybe you could license it to a company that tests anti-nausea pills or something.
Sounds like Mirror's Edge (I loved it but every time I played it I felt sick lol)
I absolutely loved the original, the falling mechanism definitely inspired it
Happiness.
Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.
Star trek sim. Like bridgecrew but better. Larger crews including a medical and engineering and security.
Faster than light is close, but not really a sim perse
Giant alien spiders are no joke!
This isn’t so much a sim thing, but I would love to have a spaceship game that was like Sea of Thieves.
Honestly, Deep Rock Galactic could be that if it had more of a world to explore
There are a few indie games like this. Artemis is the first to come to mind but it's old, primitive, and clunky to play. Empty Epsilon is a free open-source spiritual successor that's supposed to be better, but I haven't played it.
Stationeers is vaguely that sort of thing, but more focused on maintaining a space station than exploring.
The one I've had in my head for a while is a "Factory" simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you'd actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.
There’s a game called Automation that covers some of these aspects.
I’m a kitchen designer and use an app called 2020 design to do cabinet layouts.
Thing is, we’ve got 3D models of every single cabinet we sell, plus a lot of name brand appliances.
It would be fun, for this factory game, to use real machinery from real companies. It would be a pretty massive undertaking to simulate all those machines, but existing CAD models could be a start.
I imagine there'd be IP stuff to worry about. Like, you and me probably think it's just a box with a door on it, but the company that designed it sure won't...
But I've thought myself that if you mashed up CAD files for various widgets with a UI made by a good game designer, you could have some extraordinarily useful business apps that are a hundred percent better than what's usually on the market. I can think of multiple games with base-building in them that are easier to use than business apps that honestly do very similar things.
I have to imagine there's probably some market forces at work that prevent this from happening.
One thing I sorely want in 2020 is the ability to navigate the space using regular game controls. WASD plus mouse to look.
Instead you use roughly the same controls you would to navigate the source CAD plans and elevations, to navigate the 3D rendered space.
Semi-related, but I read somewhere that there's some military equipment out there that uses a video game controller b/c that was easiest to train young recruits on since most already were quite familiar with it.
Definitely don't play eve online
Virtual Virtual Skeeball simulator.
Maybe it exists already but I'd love a good hiking simulator for a console where when you take stunning snapshots you could send them to your phone and use as backgrounds.
A rocket design simulator in the same sort of vein as kerbal space program or juno new origins/simplerockets, but as realistic as reasonably possible and with as many options as can reasonably be programmed in (so for example, rather than just placing an engine or getting to specify a couple parameters like nozzle size, you'd have to specify the power cycle and number of combustion chambers per turbopump, size and construction material of various major components, fuel and oxidizer type, etc)
That sounds delightfully complicated
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.
For years I've been wanting a simulator simulator simulator. It's like those simulator simulator games you've played except it's simulating the next level up, playing the people who built the simulator simulator.
Like Game Dev Tycoon or building a redstone computer in Minecraft that itself plays Minecraft type of deal?
Pet-sim, for VR.
God simulator.
Create a world affect it's geological development, evolution of creatures, rise and fall of different religions, reward and punish through blessings or plagues, rise and fall of different civilizations and watch holy wars develop.
Check out a small indie game called world box. Also there is Black and White 1&2, but those are fairly old at this point.
So Populous.
Edit: sorta
That's just being a dungeon master
Global Eden
Objective: plant the 🌎🌍 globe
Where (in simulation?) You can build nurseries, build drones to send plants to your local surroundings, link up with other druids across the Earth, collect & add reports on mycelium, bacterial & insect cohabitations, explore the woodwidewebs, develop food & energy generation, waste remediation for all buildings (every plot of land on the planet shall (should) contribute to global wealth). Restore & progress balance of life from this dismal current dystopian quest for blood oil steel and waste. Make this planet a better vacation spot than Risa in the closest 1000 galaxies.
A happy Ent-friendly planet.
Understanding local Flora & fungii for food, dress, & medication (open source libraries & communities at every forest!)
I love to see more use of tech towards global wealth & unity. Good air & water, good food, good communities, great forests, good travels... These are elements of global wealth. Money and marketing have dwindling use & tax us of great creativity (another lovely element of global wealth) and energies. Building & sharing abilities are priceless.
Gratitude & celebration daily.
There have been a few games where the goal was to make a planet/region habitable again, I've always liked the idea. It's like a reverse city builder.
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.
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.
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 always wanted to try a world simulator based around mana flows. Trying to create a set of fictional rules that generated a functioning world seems fun.
The two I want are already made. Goat Simulator and Great Lakes Simulator.
Fucking
I think Steam already has a whole category for that...
OK, but do they have something for my broken vacuum?
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.
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.
every-setting-from-dreams-i-have explorer
World of World of Warcraft
Sad thing is WoW could already be that. But because all focus is on the last expansion, the rest of the vast game is basically dead and devoid of players. It's not "World of Warcraft" but "Zone of Warcraft".
Elder Scrolls Online has its fair share of flaws, but the "One Tamriel" update did make all content playable by all players. You see ESO players in every zone, not just in the latest expansion.
Warlords of Dreanor literally had this lol. You would manage a squad of npcs equipping gear and stuff and send them on dungeon quests. It would just give you a percent chance of succeed or not and you would hit go and wait several hours.
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
Reboot Steel Battalion, the only real mech simulator.
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.
I read an idea a long while back that I'll repeat:
A spy game in the style of Splinter Cell, except you aren't the guy, you're his handler. You tell him "crawl under that laser," or "wait a moment, there's a guard... okay now go!" or "input the following sequence to disable the doomsday device," and he more or less listens to what you tell him to do. The issue is that the more you fuck up and get him hurt or killed, the less likely he is to listen to you. So you have to build up a relationship with your spy by giving him good instructions in a timely fashion and getting him to complete missions successfully. Over the course of the game, as you progress, you'd be able to tell him to do more dangerous things because he'd trust you more. Playing the game successfully would make you feel like you and your spy were a well-oiled machine, working together to take down supervillains and criminal syndicates.
Even more interesting... Imagine a 2 player co-op game. The "spy" player is playing a tactical fps, but has no minimap or enemy detection. The "handler" player is patched into all the security cameras and tells the spy where to go and where the enemies are.
Well I have great news for you. That game already exists. Look up Operation Tango.
Oh damn. I just looked it up and it seems like fun. Now if only I had any friends....
Look up black hat cooperative! It's vr but sounds pretty similar to what you after describing.
I don't have VR, but that sounds cool. Actually the thing that came to mind when I was describing it was "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes"
That actually exists. Operation Tango if I recall correctly.
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.
I never expected to find the idea of a game based on finding utilities underground to be exciting but you did it. I'm in.
If only I had the time to learn game programming. And art, and music, and...basically everything.
I could be rich!
A few things to remember to add:
Yeah, reading about these things are what made me realize how layered the game could be.
You could have a lying contractor who kicked dirt over your marks, and whether you would get the blame or not would depend on screenshots you took of your work beforehand XD
From a technical perspective, I bet programming abandoned utilities and how those impact detection would be a challenge for the programmers interested in the "simulation" part. I bet there's some math going on there!
Lmao this is hilarious. You could also throw in kids from the neighborhood stealing the little red flags 🚩 that are left in the ground for marking digs
This is a genuinely great idea. I've been playing Dave the Diver and I can see this having a similar level of management, slowly introducing you to the new roles - first you're just marking, and over time you're managing more and more of the whole process and earning money on the way.
Heaps of room for cool visuals like revealing the pipes you find, cutscenes showing work done/completed.
Love it! 100% would play this.
Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world
I would love this, put on an audiobook, get stoned, and drive around the alps or Southeast Asia. No traffic and no danger
Alps? No traffic? Mate, have you ever tried crossing the Alps during holiday season?
Nope! But why would they program the traffic into such a simulation?
Realism!
what if they made it multiplayer
I would not play such a game
The closest thing to that would probably be euro truck simulator 2
City Car Driving exists, but I don’t know how extensive it is. You can also install mods on ETS2 to drive around in normal cars.
I tried that on my steam deck, controller support is non existent from when I last played
Id say closest game right now is assetto Corsa with mods
Ets2 has trucks, even if you mod a car in it still feels and drives like a truck
I want to rip it around my home town in a fast car, swerving through traffic lool
Isn't there a thing on Google earth where you can sorta do that?
A modern version of the 1998 Sierra game with real world data would be great. I spent so much time in the freedrive mode on that back in the day.
I think I remember an aeroplane in Google earth lol
I know there's a very basic version of this online somewhere, you can drive a car on top of Google maps satellite view
Just wait for content creators to play this drunk
Beam.ng has some pretty good maps where you can just drive around. They aren’t quite fleshed out as much but there’s a ton of mods too so you might be able to find one that’s just a Sunday driver.
I'd say assetto Corsa is better right now, beamng feels like a crash simulator or even just a scene creator rather than a proper driving sim
In asetto Corsa I can get real world cars in real world maps and drive it around
I’d like a realistic ecosystem simulator where it isn’t from a human perspective. Like, maybe you start as a beaver and build a damn and it changes your river and has lots of effects on other species. Maybe then you switch to a bear and eat a salmon. Does a bear shit in the woods? It does! And it helps the trees.
As a non realistic version, have you played timber born? It's about beavers making dams and towns, but very much not realistic.
Excavation Simulator.
Just put all resources into simulating dirt well, then make a game about driving various power equipment. A sandbox game, where you just build whatever you want. VR would be fun.
Actually, I was recently thinking of gravel pit simulator. It's be like a farming sim, you'd buy various equipment and use them to move dirt separating gravel and selling it to get money to buy better requirements.
That’s be great. It would be especially cool if you could simulate gravel, with all its friction and inertia and everything. And then somehow make that same model handle everything down to the molecular sheets of clay.
I bet that model would be mind expanding to build
Not quite the same, but Snowrunner does detailed mud simulation well... and you get to drive various vehicles through it
I’ve played it a bit. The winch cables are a lot of fun
The game 'Captain of Industry' isn't a simulator, but it did come to mind when reading this comment. Kinda like cities skylines but with a heavy focus on excavation. There's one map where I spent hours excavating a path up a mountainside to escape the starting area.
I've had this one in my head because I genuinely thought it existed.
Tank Crew Simulator. It's like Fury where you're in a little tank with three other guys. Your view of the world is through a tiny slit in the metal or if you decide you want to risk getting your head blown off, you can open your hatch. If you're the loader, make sure the main gun operator has a round loaded into the cannon. If you're driving, don't be that guy who runs over an anti-tank mine. As the gunner, it's your duty to keep your head connected to your shoulders.
You could do that in the original Operation Flashpoint. Don't think there was a loader, though.
Planetside 2 also has a lot of things like that. Not a loader, but most vehicles have separate drivers and gunners (with a few exceptions).
It would actually make a good VR game you could play sitting in a chair
I just want a life sim with reasonably believable NPCs. Dwarf Fortress is the only game I've seen really attempt something like this, where NPCs act intelligently, and you can ask them about topics and events dynamically.
Essentially, I want a game where the NPCs are capable of doing everything the player can, so I could start a shop and give out quests myself, if I want.
I've actually been "working" on a project like this. It's a huge undertaking, but who knows, maybe I'll get there one day.
I wonder if AI's like ChatGTP make this more achievable
I've thought a lot about that. I think it definitely does, but I also think there's a lot of unfulfilled potential left in more "traditional" AI.
There are pros and cons to the GPT approach, with down-sides such as the (current) limit on the context, and difficulty establishing consistent "facts". These are generally outweighed by the obvious up-sides, but a GPT-based AI will feel different than a more hard-coded one.
All this to say: There will be a hundred better GPT-based games released before I can ever hope to release my project.
Oh, also: the way I'm writing my project, I'm intentionally making the AI modular, so I can "slot in" something like ChatGPT and play around with that.
Yes... But actually no.
ChatGPT is amazing for generating reasonable-sounding prose. That means you can have an NPC say things that largely make sense... If you know what they need to say.
For instance, let's say you ask an NPC for directions to the mayor's house. In this scenario, you need your NPC to
Parse and understand the player's speech. (This is a question. The question is about reaching a location. The location is the mayor's house.)
Modeling the NPC's knowledge. (Does this NPC know where the mayor lives? Do they know someone else who does?)
Disambiguating conversation. (Do we have a mayor? Are they asking about our mayor, or - from context- someone in a different town?)
Constructing an answer. (Left, right, right, straight...)
Converting the answer to a conversational tone. (Well, if ya' head south down wewhauken, turn right on glottis st...)
Chat GPT solves #5 for sure. But 1-4 are...iffy. Sometimes, you can give Chat GPT a list of factoids and it'll reply with the data you gave it. Other times it'll "hallucinate" an answer, especially if a player asks something you didn't expect. (And people will definitely come up with stuff you don't expect.)
Still, LLMs do solve a really hard piece of the dynamic-NPC puzzle. I'm sure we'll see them in use. It's just not necessarily even the hardest part of this problem.
On a similar note, middle management simulator
It better have a middle management manager sitting at their desk playing the middle management simulator.
You have to simulate a metropolitan police department for a futuristic city. You have to maintain funding by making sure neighborhoods and districts are safe. There would be side missions where you take out the local gangs in that area, discover that there's a evil, crime syndicate that's manipulating crime within the city. You have to capture, interrogate, and decide to either charge someone or let them go. Your actions determine what kind of department you run. Are you corrupt? Are you by the books? Do you inspire people to do better, or do you strike fear in the citizens of your city. It'd be completely open world, you'd control your department on an overhead map, assign cops certain roles or positions at certain locations. You maintain relationships with your cops, and you have to go home daily, and hope your second in command is up to the tasks of maintaining things without you. You also have to contend with corrupt cops and corrupt politicians that provide your funding. Do you risk losing funding and your position? Or do you make your citizens proud by upholding the law?
Unionization simulator. Talk to coworkers, see who is supportive. Risk revealing too much to soon to someone who runs to the bosses.
Also strike simulator as a sequel.
Revolution simulator for the trilogy.
I've wanted to create a game that's a simulation of mental health issues. For instance, youre playing someone who has autism. You turn to walk down a street. Turn to look, touch, car crash horns, screaming. Touch a wall, textures explode, patterns etching into your outstretched arm. Or, one about ptsd. Another about auditory processing disorder.
My IRL reality can be so hypervivid, intense, super saturated, surreal. Often wish someone else could experience it, know what it's like.
Senuas sacrifice is that specifically about schizophrenia I believe
In college I made a game called Freefall Simulator. The idea was to make a game with the goal of making the player motion sick, as if they were falling.
It worked, a little too well.
I had to play it for hours on end.
You were ahead of your time. Turns out, motion sickness simulations became so popular, that companies started building hardware specifically for it.
I've thought about how fun and nauseating it would be on VR, NGL
I can see that as the logical conclusion of your game. You really should make the ultimate vomit cannon like that. Maybe you could license it to a company that tests anti-nausea pills or something.
Sounds like Mirror's Edge (I loved it but every time I played it I felt sick lol)
I absolutely loved the original, the falling mechanism definitely inspired it
Happiness.
Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.
Star trek sim. Like bridgecrew but better. Larger crews including a medical and engineering and security.
Faster than light is close, but not really a sim perse
Giant alien spiders are no joke!
This isn’t so much a sim thing, but I would love to have a spaceship game that was like Sea of Thieves.
Honestly, Deep Rock Galactic could be that if it had more of a world to explore
There are a few indie games like this. Artemis is the first to come to mind but it's old, primitive, and clunky to play. Empty Epsilon is a free open-source spiritual successor that's supposed to be better, but I haven't played it.
Stationeers is vaguely that sort of thing, but more focused on maintaining a space station than exploring.
The one I've had in my head for a while is a "Factory" simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you'd actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.
There’s a game called Automation that covers some of these aspects.
I’m a kitchen designer and use an app called 2020 design to do cabinet layouts.
Thing is, we’ve got 3D models of every single cabinet we sell, plus a lot of name brand appliances.
It would be fun, for this factory game, to use real machinery from real companies. It would be a pretty massive undertaking to simulate all those machines, but existing CAD models could be a start.
I imagine there'd be IP stuff to worry about. Like, you and me probably think it's just a box with a door on it, but the company that designed it sure won't...
But I've thought myself that if you mashed up CAD files for various widgets with a UI made by a good game designer, you could have some extraordinarily useful business apps that are a hundred percent better than what's usually on the market. I can think of multiple games with base-building in them that are easier to use than business apps that honestly do very similar things.
I have to imagine there's probably some market forces at work that prevent this from happening.
One thing I sorely want in 2020 is the ability to navigate the space using regular game controls. WASD plus mouse to look.
Instead you use roughly the same controls you would to navigate the source CAD plans and elevations, to navigate the 3D rendered space.
Semi-related, but I read somewhere that there's some military equipment out there that uses a video game controller b/c that was easiest to train young recruits on since most already were quite familiar with it.
Definitely don't play eve online
Virtual Virtual Skeeball simulator.
Maybe it exists already but I'd love a good hiking simulator for a console where when you take stunning snapshots you could send them to your phone and use as backgrounds.
A rocket design simulator in the same sort of vein as kerbal space program or juno new origins/simplerockets, but as realistic as reasonably possible and with as many options as can reasonably be programmed in (so for example, rather than just placing an engine or getting to specify a couple parameters like nozzle size, you'd have to specify the power cycle and number of combustion chambers per turbopump, size and construction material of various major components, fuel and oxidizer type, etc)
That sounds delightfully complicated
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.
For years I've been wanting a simulator simulator simulator. It's like those simulator simulator games you've played except it's simulating the next level up, playing the people who built the simulator simulator.
Like Game Dev Tycoon or building a redstone computer in Minecraft that itself plays Minecraft type of deal?
Pet-sim, for VR.
God simulator.
Create a world affect it's geological development, evolution of creatures, rise and fall of different religions, reward and punish through blessings or plagues, rise and fall of different civilizations and watch holy wars develop.
Check out a small indie game called world box. Also there is Black and White 1&2, but those are fairly old at this point.
So Populous.
Edit: sorta
That's just being a dungeon master
Global Eden
Objective: plant the 🌎🌍 globe
Where (in simulation?) You can build nurseries, build drones to send plants to your local surroundings, link up with other druids across the Earth, collect & add reports on mycelium, bacterial & insect cohabitations, explore the woodwidewebs, develop food & energy generation, waste remediation for all buildings (every plot of land on the planet shall (should) contribute to global wealth). Restore & progress balance of life from this dismal current dystopian quest for blood oil steel and waste. Make this planet a better vacation spot than Risa in the closest 1000 galaxies. A happy Ent-friendly planet.
Understanding local Flora & fungii for food, dress, & medication (open source libraries & communities at every forest!)
I love to see more use of tech towards global wealth & unity. Good air & water, good food, good communities, great forests, good travels... These are elements of global wealth. Money and marketing have dwindling use & tax us of great creativity (another lovely element of global wealth) and energies. Building & sharing abilities are priceless.
Gratitude & celebration daily.
There have been a few games where the goal was to make a planet/region habitable again, I've always liked the idea. It's like a reverse city builder.
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.
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.
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 always wanted to try a world simulator based around mana flows. Trying to create a set of fictional rules that generated a functioning world seems fun.
The two I want are already made. Goat Simulator and Great Lakes Simulator.
Fucking
I think Steam already has a whole category for that...
OK, but do they have something for my broken vacuum?
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.
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.
every-setting-from-dreams-i-have explorer
World of World of Warcraft
Sad thing is WoW could already be that. But because all focus is on the last expansion, the rest of the vast game is basically dead and devoid of players. It's not "World of Warcraft" but "Zone of Warcraft".
Elder Scrolls Online has its fair share of flaws, but the "One Tamriel" update did make all content playable by all players. You see ESO players in every zone, not just in the latest expansion.
Warlords of Dreanor literally had this lol. You would manage a squad of npcs equipping gear and stuff and send them on dungeon quests. It would just give you a percent chance of succeed or not and you would hit go and wait several hours.
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
Reboot Steel Battalion, the only real mech simulator.
Memelord Simulator