Everyone is talking about (deferred) lighting systems, high-poly normal mapped animated models and other fancy effects, but I barely never see discussions about gameplay or game ideas. After all that is what playing games comes down to, you come for the eye candy but stay for the content.
Therefore let us think and talk about game ideas and share those!
In my opinion a(n indie) game does not have to have a unique key feature or put the main focus on a single mechanic - that's what currently almost all indie games/ platformers do that I can think of - because I think they get old really quickly, instead I think games should only do some things well, i.e. they should be fun.

I will start with a few of my ideas, please feel free to add your own:

1) A game that is centered around floors of a high building, maybe with a highscore focus.

2) An adventure/ platformer based on cardboard box figures, similar to the following picture (copyright is unknown to me, sorry):



3) A racing game similar to F-Zero for the SNES.

4) I've once posted the following story idea on the Sergeant Rampage thread, i.e. a story for a top down shooter:



5) A Metroid style non-linear exploration based game where you fly a spaceship (or something else) and continuously get better and better (and get more abilities) by beating boss enemies, maybe on an alien planet that features some kind of mystery.

A detective point and click story with Detective Tedious (has a tedious way of solving things...).



Or a platformer where you play a llamabot and need to blast as many enemies as you can to buy upgrades for yourself.

I have a bunch of small game ideas, and even few stories for scary games (which I've wrote myself). But I'll describe a small horror game idea:


And here is another example, of great idea I think:
Destroy the Porn

Super addictive, they managed to have some great story intrigue also :

RimeLands.

On mobile :
Just addictive (not so repetitive caus fun and you gain experience and equipment stuff)
TinyLegends :

Nice game there 3Run, Destroy the Porn. You get imba items very quick, but the levels are still getting gradually harder. Not easy to make such a mechanic.

Joozey@ yep, but it's quiet simple there, thats what I've liked most. BTW, thats a great channel on the youtube, a lot of free indie games can be found there for inspiration!

1.)
A game I'd call "Hackers". The idea is to deliver a multiplayer experience based on those scenes we've all seen in movies where people start hacking something and it's done via some crazy to stupid graphical representation to give the viewer something to look at. So there'd be like two teams one being the hackers trying to invade a system and one being the "defenders" who try to slow down / throw back the hackers. Each match would be around a "map" which one can imagine like an electric circuit with certain parts connected to each other. Each player then can choose an element to hack or support where you of course have to stick to a certain kind of sequence so the hackers have a starting point and work their way down the "lanes" of the circuit piece by piece and ultimately have to reach a final position in the circuit (usually at the other side of the circuit) in a certain time frame. Each part a player tries to hack leads to what I'd describe as a minigame which is about math or a puzzle game (or both). Not too complicated stuff but of course no 2+3 calculations or something like that. One probably could introduce several levels of difficulty so one doesn't get overwhelmed by too difficult tasks...

The game would be both about the thrill of solving those tasks as fast as possible while also keeping some tactics in mind in terms of which lane in the circuit you choose where certain parts you "conquer" give you special effects like slowing an enemy down, blocking a certain lane or have a player restart their "minigame". I imagine thrilling 3v3 matches where the "defenders" of course aren't real "counter hackers" but what they can achieve ideally just slows the hackers down so the time runs out before the hackers reach their goal...

2.)
Something like the Crusader games. Isometric perspective, controlling your character with a gamepad for real 360° movement control and then throwing both enemies and traps at the player. This might work for both a sci-fi scenario with its light barriers, cameras, codepads and so on as well as for a fantasy scenario where you raid temples or something like that filled with traps and enemies - the more advanced traps serving the same role as cameras would be explained via magic although the sci-fi scenario probably is the more convincing one. One could advance where the Crusader series left off with more advanced physic puzzles (or just smashing a pile of barrels hitting everyone standing next to it). Additional options like a cloaking device similar to the Predator for stealth missions where people see you when moving too fast / too close to them also would be possible...

3.)
A turn based RPG with a hex-grid based system and moderate tactics depth (and when I say moderate I mean "moderate" when comparing to "OMG is this complex" titles one hardly sees anymore nowadays). The twist of this concept is about being a parody on fantasy games / popculture. I won't go into any details here as this is what I'm actually planning as my next project I want to approach a bit more seriously so it doesn't result in "useless doodling" which most of my projects turn out to be...

4.)
A remake of Imperialism with certain extensions to the gameplay especially when thinking of the rather simplistic battles. The gameplay is just too addictive and I come back to playing this regularly...

5.)
Something like Megaman X. I so miss Megaman X games. Ok maybe X5-X7 weren't all THAT good but they still were fun to play (and especially X6 is damn hard) but I thought X8 was just a blast and had clever gameplay extensions especially with Axl as the 3rd playable characters and his different gameplay creating this nice "trinity" of different gameplay. Unfortunately Capcom shows little to no interest in this franchise anymore...

6.)
Ok this basically is the 3rd "remake project" but I'd really appreciate another Rollcage game although as rumors say there is some kind of "Rollcage-X" or something like that in the making. Still I loved the Rollcage games as they basically combined Mario Kart with a great racing component involving higher speeds (though nowhere near F-Zero speed), skill and crazy stuff like driving on tunnel walls...

7.)
Now for something more unique again. A space combat "simulator" where you steer something like a Starfury from Babylon 5. The clue here: Due to the fighter design you have real thruster control and don't just fly straight ahead like in Star Wars. It would pretty much be a space game with newtonian physics with slight "alternations" to make it more fun. You'd steer with a gamepad where one stick makes your fighter rotate the way you want and the other one controls the thrusters. So when you push left on the "thruster stick" your entire ship slightly moves to the left (from your cockpit perspective). This makes many interesting combat situations possible where it's all about the piloting skills - just like seen on Babylon 5. To increase the fun even more there would be a "maneuver database" where the player can programm certain maneuvers. Ingame the player has two ringmenus where he always can fire up a certain number of premade maneuvers. Imagine a roll to the top left which ends you facing backwards not only giving a nice evasive maneuver that makes you hard to hit but you also end up facing "backwards" and now can fire back. Due to the Newtonian approach you of course will continue flying in the direction you accelerated in the first place so you now can fire at targets behind you while still "flying forward". To spice things up there'd be some missions with fights around capital ships where one e.g. has to "strafe" around the enemy to avoid being shot. To give some better impressions maybe have a look at THIS or THIS. I think it would be great fun to create those maneuvers in an editor and then using them on the battlefield. With each pilot pretty much having his unique set of maneuvers he can throw in I think this would lead to exciting battles where it's not about who aims better but also who throws in the better tricks to fool the enemy / evade fire...

Nice idea for a thread! I love talking about game concepts and ideas!

In no particular order.....




Aww, that IS a cute picture! Reminds me of Tweenbots (previously discussed here). It's not really a game idea though, right? Real talk, a thread about discussing art style would also be interesting.





While I can't argue with those ideas, I also, well, can't discuss them really - you need to give a few more details than that, man!
There's one guy on screenshotsaturday doing a F-Zero/Wipeout-like game that procedurally generates it's tracks. Kind of makes content creation easier, or at least more interesting for us "programmer guys", I s'ppose.



Love Metroid, love non-linear exploration, love spaceships - idea is approved! Do you know the Captain Forever series? It does a similar thing with the creating and exploration.
In any event, I really like the idea. Metroid is great at conveying a certain "sense of place", of conveying an athmosphere, and sometimes also at telling stories without many words or any cutscenes. Perhaps we could learn from that - perhaps we can even do these procedurally, somehow? A well-placed dead-soldier-ragdoll can tell a story, I guess. Though I'm not sure how far beyond that we could go.




Aah, the horror genre.
A few weeks ago, I would have argued that you shouldn't limit yourself to old-school graphics like those we have in mind when saying 8-bit, but I think now that it should be possible to make that scary. Since I'm linking to other games all the time, why not here - do you know Imscared (the link goes to a Let's play of that - spoilers that way, if you're interested in playing it yourself, check out it's IndieDB page!).
That said, I'm not sure I can imagine the game you've described - since you're trying to bring back the old-school feeling, I guess you're targeting gamers with a history of those times, mostly? I dunno, right now I'm imagining a "scary" version of Pokemon or Zelda or something where I run away from a monster that cannot be defeated.





Cool idea! I like it. If it turns out that the asymmetrical gameplay you describe is too difficult (maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it seems that the Hackers-gameplay is more thought out, perhaps because it's more fun to imagine (and therefore the end result to play?)), it should be rather simple to turn it into a game where all players are hackers - either they both try to reach the same goal (and can slow each other down), or if you want to keep the defensive elements, the teams could try to intrude the other teams' systems. Allow several ways to win (several paths into it, perhaps?) to make sure it's not getting boring, and you have a winner!




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So here's an old idea of mine:



Back seven hundred years ago when I made those "Experimental games" series games, one of the concepts I wanted to do was a puzzle game in which you received distress calls or strange messages that you had to decode. There would be hints or messages left in there that somehow - different in every video - you'd have to decipher by replaying the video, slowing it down, playing it in reverse, only investigating the audio - the list goes on. It still sounds like a neat idea to me, but I doubt there's many out there who'd love to play this. Also, I am aware that this isn't well thought or planned out - you can tell I didn't spend too much time on this one back in the day!


Finally:

If you have never done this, you should really take a look at Wikipedia's "Mystery"-category. It provides an instant super-interesting starting point for videogames. Each of these entries could, probably, make for an interesting scenario to exploit in a game.
Perhaps combining this with "Investigation" gameplay that some games have (to a small extent the Ace Attorney series, a better example being LA Noire), you could create a very athmospheric, very interesting "X-Files"-kind of deal.


Thoughts on these "ideas" (more like, rough outlines of ideas) are much appreciated!

the adventure/platformer game with a cardbox figure is definitely a very good idea! there could be danger zones for the character like fire and water, and wind could also have a great effect in case of a platformer. ideal for a cartoonish game for children.

Hmm ... well I fail to see the good idea here. It certainly is a nice and stylish character but just that doesn't make it a good game (idea). Not that there exist no opportunities but calling a character concept a great game idea is not what I would have expected here...

Apart from that:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=owhNydizKB8