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.
I like it. The core would have to be slapdash approximation of existing real-world simulations. Chemical reactions, particles moving in fields, light polarization, all that jazz. Simplify those equations for real-time performance. Then you just need particles with negative gravity, and crystals that make all light green, and other wacky nonsense the player can learn, use, and abuse.
Potential complexity goes up exponentially with each ridiculous thing that can interact with all the other things. The hard part is keeping symptoms consistent - applying these rules to medium-scale, everyday situations, like the color of the air inside the ship. There must be visible weirdness to point people toward the fact that something’s fucky. Scientifically speaking.
So far the best thing I had come up with that would realistically work is coming up with a set of “properties” like hardness, mass, conductivity, etc and making the individual bits (matter and energy) have random properties that you could mix and match to get stats for things you’re making… But that still sounds too simplistic and boring to me. But I tend to be a perfectionist so maybe it would be something others would be fine with and I’m just sabotaging myself.
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.
I like it. The core would have to be slapdash approximation of existing real-world simulations. Chemical reactions, particles moving in fields, light polarization, all that jazz. Simplify those equations for real-time performance. Then you just need particles with negative gravity, and crystals that make all light green, and other wacky nonsense the player can learn, use, and abuse.
Potential complexity goes up exponentially with each ridiculous thing that can interact with all the other things. The hard part is keeping symptoms consistent - applying these rules to medium-scale, everyday situations, like the color of the air inside the ship. There must be visible weirdness to point people toward the fact that something’s fucky. Scientifically speaking.
So far the best thing I had come up with that would realistically work is coming up with a set of “properties” like hardness, mass, conductivity, etc and making the individual bits (matter and energy) have random properties that you could mix and match to get stats for things you’re making… But that still sounds too simplistic and boring to me. But I tend to be a perfectionist so maybe it would be something others would be fine with and I’m just sabotaging myself.