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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

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I have long ago dreamt up my ideal game, and started working on it about ten years ago. SInce then, I have learned a lot about making games and even more about how to not make them and I still have nothing playable to show for it. At least it gave me good practice for starting a career in software development.

Here's the pitch: First-Person Kenshi (*) in a low-tech high-existential-horror sci-fi setting.

  • Sandbox game, no plot or story whatsoever. You have some freedom in character generation, and then you're just dropped in there.
  • Low-fidelity simulated world. Everything that you see in the game is interactable, nothing is mechanically empty set-dressing. There would be economics and politics simulations running in the background for NPCs, but the only way to interact with those is through the NPCs themselves; not through menus.
  • Realistic scale, speed and precision. The world is big, there's a lot of space, vehicles move fast, and when you see something impressively big, then it really is big.
  • To pay the performance price for the two points above, the world is also largely empty. Many may dislike this, but it suits my aesthetic sensibilities.
  • There should be basic survival mechanics - humans need food, temperature matters, injuries don't heal magically, inventory management needs to be done - but it's not meant to be a survival game. The player should be able to just hire a servant to handle all that.
  • Optional automations for the player character. I don't want players to ever be forced to do reptitive, mindless actions - you should be able to just do some light scripting to have your avatar do those for you (or hire NPCs to do them).
  • The player characters and NPCs to a lesser extent should have a sort of inner world, a collection of notions linked by associations that serves as a sort of semantic database.
  • Most content is procedurally generated. This includes meshes. Consequently, graphics would be very low-fi.
  • The world would be a large wasteland planet like everyone knows and loves from all kinds of fiction, with dramatic landscapes, ruins to explore and small civilizations scrabbling for survival on the surface. There would be a space layer with some orbital infrastructure and activities and microgravity gameplay. Technology would be constrained by the setting being a sparsely populated economic backwater, even if the game is set many millions of years in the future. The world is under constant threat by economic collapse, war, universal expansion, unfathomable AIs eating whole worlds, moral decay, and god switching off the universe because he's done with it, and the NPCs are aware of it - but all these threats loom at realistic time-scales, which is to say that it's in the far-off future for everyone. It's more background than game mechanic, thematic rather than interactive - how do people deal with the fact that for all their acitivity and thought, it will all come to nought in the end?
  • It would be full of cool things I like to see. Spaceships, guns, swordfighting, hiking, stargazing (yes I thought of actual stargazing mechanics), intergenerational contributions to the commons in the face of inevitable annihilation, conversations about one's role in the universe, megastructures, things going fast, big wide open brilliantly blue and golden skies, synthetic aliens, geology, nation-building, and the player free to explore or reject all of it.

Obviously this is all a big technical ask, but over the years I have done little other than tinker up various technical solutions for these various challenges. Some work. Some don't - yet. What I haven't really gotten around to is tying all that together into an actual game, and of course in all my experimentation over the years each individual component ended up being incompatible with most others. It's been a journey, and it's entirely unclear whether I'll ever reach any kind of destination.

(*) A note on Kenshi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/): I had my concept largely worked out long before Kenshi ever became visible to the public, but it does hit a lot of the same bullet points. And then goes a completely different way. Still, it's the closest equivalent to what I want to do. I recommend Kenshi as a game that breaks with many conventions and really strikes out to do its own thing.

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