With Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing coming out at almost the same time and being two of the biggest games around- I'd be amazed if some indie dev hadn't though of marrying these concepts- maybe you're setting up a community of friendly monsters in hell or you're on a quaint island gouging out cute creatures' eyes.
Can anyone think of any other game hybrids that are missing from our lives? Best answer wins a toilet roll.
Okay, I just woke up and just had my morning tea so I think its the best time for me to reply since Common Sense has not woke up, here is a list of them.
[Be warned, this will get really weird]
- I Wanna Be The Guy and Yoshi's Island
- Harvest Moon and Quake
- RAGE and Five Nights At Freddy's (All of em)
- Touhou (every game, including spin-offs) and DoDonPachi (Actually that wouldn't be too weird i guess)
- Sonic The Hedgehog and Outlast
- Minecraft and Candy Crush
- ROBLOX and Call Of Duty
- Mortal Combat and any Dating simulator (I would like to see how that works out)
And my all time favorite...
Any Action based game with lots of violence and any Visual Novel (Okay, this one is a little too generic but I'm still putting it on here)
Have a nice day :3
Reading your ideas has made me realise just how out of touch I am with most modern games XD
I think Mortal Kombat dating sim definitely has legs. Maybe you could have combo moves that result in compliments, empathy, hugs etc. and... if it goes badly, the pair just start fighting each other!
Our last game was actually a visual novel with lots of violence. Couldn't find a way to throw in any action scenes, sadly. A VN that turns into a FPS halfway through for no apparent reason would be cool...
I was inspired on my indie dev project 'Miniature Multiverse' by something completely unrelated to video games.
Inspiration for game elements can come from outside the field you're in (gaming) and often that helps. Recall Will Wright, taking an urban planning course in college and thinking, this (building and zoning and running a city) could be a game and that ended up being SimCity. Or how the notion of megahit 'The Sims' came from watching a child play with a dollhouse. Try taking something outside video gaming and imagine how it could become part of the design of a game.
Namely, in my case the idea for a current project emerged from model railroading and the way people create those super detailed miniature scenes! In 2010 I looked at some first person camera run throughs of larger scale model rail sets and thought, wouldn't it be interesting to make a wide range of imaginative fantasy worlds (like a Myst game, etc) but made with detailed, physically real materials, and allow players to explore them in first person view?
http://www.MiniatureMultiverse.com
The miniature idea also crossed my mind in other permutations, like a racing game using remote control of RC cars over the web, in a realistic scale model racetrack. You would mount cameras like GoPros inside them and stream that video to the players plus overlays for vehicle control. I still have yet to attempt to figure out a way to do this as code is one of my weaker spots.
Another example of this was my project Vivid Minigolf. It was jokingly referred to during early development as 'Miniature Miniature Golf'. I made the error of building it in Gamesalad initially but now am redoing it in a much improved form, with Construct 2. That will avoid the arbitrary filesize limits on HTML5 and other platform output games that GS imposed.
I recall having discussions of my ideas relating to accelerometer-based AR (augmented reality) in 2011 or so, and when Pokemon GO showed up and others were saying how cool the concept was, I just shrugged and said 'why did this take so long?' and 'why haven't they pushed it further than this by now?'
I love the idea of an AR / VR hybrid escape room, in which the player's Vr headset was a window into an alternate form of the physical room. Think about it this way, there would be a very minimalist physical space to explore, just rooms with plaster walls and roughly sculpted shapes, and the app loaded when entering the room would be in the headset mounted onto player's head, converting the boundaries of the physical space into a much more interesting and imaginative virtual world, such that the virtual space would be tracked continually to match the layout and 3d position of the real space, creating a breathtaking virtual environment to physically explore that is also entirely tactile. I am now looking at the Aryzon headset as a possible way to someday test the idea. It would be an entirely other level of VR. Alternatively, laser tag + VR, the normal tag overlaid with an illusion of using 'actual' powerful weapons, in a scifi setting, otherwise same core concept though.
These are just a few ideas of mine.
I also have a bunch of stuff on itch, including a lot of stock media asset packs. If you want to see my ideas realized someday, buying these wouldn't hurt, and the asset packs are great value regardless especially during holidays (my next sales are Easter, Memorial Day, and July 4th, on those days bundle sales should be running that give indie game devs access to 70+ 3d assets, 120+ video elements and overlays, and 1400+ texture image files and decals, for about a dollar!
You may also want to look at some of the links there. http://www.TriumphantArtists.com is about to be updated heavily with new informative articles for creative types, and there are other venues like other domains I run, my social media feeds (Twitter, FB, Instagram, and Pinterest), and my Etsy shop that may be worth a look.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel
Thanks for reading.
Hey Matt,
Thanks for your reply! I feel bad that I'm probably not doing it justice when I've just finished my week's shift at the hospital and am unwinding with a bottle of wine.
But, yeah. your games do seem really original and cool and, once I'm in a better frame of mind, I will enjoy checking them out!
I don't what DDR is so I googled it and the first result was East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik)- let's go with that. It's the 70s and the world is on the brink of nuclear war. The USA, USSR and allies decide whether capitalism or communism will triumph based on a game of American football in Berlin.
The Americans win in the end. Of course they do- the sport has the name 'American' in it- no other countries even know the rules. The communists really should have insisted on a boxing or weightlifting tournament...
