Doesn’t have to be ambitious or even ever released. Just curious to hear your ideas and techniques. Screenshots are welcome!
I’ll start. I’m working on a top down roughly ww2 era RTS. I have two main gimmicks:
The first one is that the front line is persistent, allowing you to start a battle whenever to advance/skirmish/capture equipment/whatever, or be forced to defend when the enemy decides to attack. You’re squads will be where you left them allowing you to prepare defenses in advance and having to think ahead of how the situation can change (and be forced to improvise when it does).
The second gimmick is that you can design you’re squads as you want. You can for example spread out smgs so that all squad leaders have one, improving the close range firepower of all squads. You can also give all you’re smgs to a single squad, making it excel in close quarters, but limiting its efficiency at range and the close range efficiency of other squads.
I want the player to solve their own problems, if they are facing tanks then they can raid the enemy at night and try to capture an At gun, or they can position themselves is forest where tanks can’t reach/are vulnerable to infantry.
Basically just this:
I’ve been working on a solitaire roguelike!
The open alpha actually started last month, and right now I’m working my way through the many bug reports.
Pretty dang ambitious, but I’m mostly building out a 3D world in Godot how I see fit.
I’ve been working on a online multiplayer simulator for the new(ish) card game Elestrals for a year now. It’s Pokémon meets Yu-Gi-Oh with a bit of Greek mythology sprinkled in, with my favourite mechanic being that your health is your resource. You can blow it all on a power play or conserve your health and strike when you spot an opening.
It’s almost done and I’m really proud of it. Obviously excluding the programmer art, the only thing left to implement in the engine is displaying stat changes client side and… The functionality for every card they’ve printed. No biggie lol.
The problem is they announced an official one and it really killed my motivation. That’s still a problem I have yet to overcome 😅
I’m creating a bullet heaven. It will have incremental, and tower defense elements. The big feature is that users will create their own bullet patterns from BulletML scripts. Those bullets will interact with the world and NPCs in different ways. For example you shoot fireballs over grass, it’s gonna set it on fire, and turn into a tile of dirt.
Working on a game in the same genre as Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. Not sure how far I’ll take it, but so far has been a good way to learn Godot.
I’ve been building an email parsing application to put online as a saas platform. I’d partnered with a business that would use it to solve the problems they have been having to justify. I’m so close now to putting the MVP online. I was hoping to get there by xmas but didn’t quite get enough time.
My goal is to kick off building a game for my 3 year old which will be a car simulator. The purpose to learn Godot.
No game project at the moment. I guess there is one main idea for a simple game I would most likely do.
I’ve participated in a game jam last year with a friend. We plan to do so again this year. February has a game jam for blind players I joined. Maybe it will be that one, maybe I will do something alone, or maybe it will end up with nothing from me.
I’m working on an RTS too, there isn’t too much to show yet.
The “inspiration” is supreme commander and other RTS being low on the complexity and planning aspects.
The approach I have seen in the industry is that people take AoE2 and starcraft as a baseline and then switch out or improve different elements. E.g. starcraft 2 massively improved unit movement and pathing. I think total biscuit tried to make a mod where resource gathering was “automated” and easier and more recently “battle aces” focuses more heavily on the skirmish aspect. Many opinions I have also heard boil down to “if you remove micro, you remove the game”. And that’s not wrong, I can certainly see the point and the skill differentiation between someone who can and someone who can’t micro their units.
But what I want to see is all of things that people already do “in their mind”, like picking a build order, certain defined “points” in their own “gameplan” that they decide “X units A Y units B is when I should attack”, or “transition points” and steps, and to make all of that explicit.
MTG “deckbuilding” works the same way, players anticipate certain problems and situations and then they build their decks with specific setups in mind and situations that they want to reach, and if they reach those states, victory gets very very close.
Taking all of that into account, surely there are just “strategies” that work better than others and finding those is more interesting or at least equally interesting as micro to me, but basically no games give you any tools or help to actually do it. You basically have to take out pen and paper to write down what worked in your last game, what didn’t.
What would a game look like that gave you ALL the planning tools and performance metrics?
To me, that’s where the modern “big scale” RTS fail, or rather, why they don’t interest me.
And also, once things are “perfectly” planned and prepared, there are always ways to introduce e.g. random failure into plan steps to keep players solving “micro” problems, they would just happen in a different place.
