There are two hard parts to this: (1) how do you make the game balanced even as the number of players fluctuates by orders of magnitude, (2) how do you make the game fun even as the amount of time each player spends differs by orders of magnitude. You will probably want key plot twists to be announced in advance so that as few people miss them as possible ("we predict the enemy hoard will arrive at our base on Friday around 8:15 PM").
Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
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Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#12Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#13Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#14There was an attempt, called "Spellsworn", which flopped very hard. Battlerite was also somewhat similar, but more cluttered and degraded very quickly.
It doesn't even have to be fantasy-based, in fact, I would like even more a successor to Comet Busters versus mode.
Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#15It's SUCH a good game as it is. I think it could only improve with the addition of creative PvP modes.
Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#16Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#17I would settle for the omega man.
Re: Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
#18Here they are:
The first one is a game where you play as Mormons, and the goal of the game is to be nice to people no matter the cost. It would start out with fairly easy things, but then you come across increasingly hostile or dangerous circumstances where you have to choose between negotiation or fleeing. You can't "die" in the game because, if you are about to die, either God or the angel Moroni will intervene. At that point, you must restart a mission. Then again, I'm not that opposed to the player dying either. I know not that much about Mormonism other than that I've known Mormons throughout my life. :)
Another idea I have is for a game I call "Monkey Town". It's somewhere between Sim City and The Sims, and takes place in a world where monkeys and various apes take the place of humans. They are as intelligent as present-day humans, but they do thinks in their own monkey ways. You are the mayor of Monkey Town, and you must build it up and maintain it. There are problems you have to deal with like monkeys pooping everywhere, political corruption, ape speciesism, infrastructure failures, monkeys rioting, monkey insurrections, etc. The monkey culture would have some differences from human society like knoodling being allowed in public, networks of vines are used for monkeys to swing between neighborhoods, bananas as currency, and so on.
My third idea is a game called "Shut Me Up", which I think of as more of a short arcade style game where your job as the player is to harass and scream at people so those people start telling you to shut up. But you keep doing it so that they start physically attacking you to get you to shut up.