Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

I've been thinking about a life-sim type game with a rogue legacy type spin.

Basically you get N actions per day (3, 5, 7, whatever works) that depend on your characters age. You might start as a baby in some random family archetype (poor/rich, dumb/smart, lazy/athletic, etc.) and after a few years you get control of the daily decisions your character makes at a granular level. Like, study in the morning, play in the afternoon, watch TV in the evening. These are more "influences" and your character can kind of rebel. Like if it gets too stressed because you are forcing it to study/work all the time then the character has a stress break and maybe gets drunk in the evening.

As the character gets older the available tasks change. As a toddler its games and light-learning, as a pre-teen it is school and sports/hobbies, as a teen it is education and social activities, as a young adult part-time jobs or university, as an adult marriage, raising kids. Perhaps as you get older you get more actions e.g. N actions per day increases.

Eventually you get to retirement then death and then you can choose one of your kids to continue the legacy. Or you can start over with a new random kid in a random family.

The gameplay would be simply choosing one of a few options available to your character at each time step. So you have N time steps per day and M available actions. The M actions are chosen in a weighted random manner from a set based on your characters abilities which changes over time, maybe some light RPG skill tree system. Could possibly be managed with a "card" system as well and would possibly shoe horn into Slay the Spire type mechanics. Overtime both positive abilities and negative abilities compound. Like, if you have too many "curse" cards in your deck, maybe your only options for an evening decisions are "drink alcohol", "ruminate on past failures", "argue with spouse".

In some sense, think of it like the day-to-day mechanics in Persona 5 mixed with the character building of The Sims. The goal of the game is to make many lifestyles possible. e.g doctor, lawyer, rockstar, president, social worker, janitor, game developer, soldier. The more difficult job types (e.g. CEO of a massive corporation, Senator) might take multiple generations to work towards.

The game "Bang! Howdy!" comes to mind. There was a mixture of realtime and turn based where you could queue an order for each of your units, but it will be executed only after cool down from the previous order passes. All cooldowns were ticking down in sync according to global clock. The unit without queued orders and off cooldown was just staying in place and the orders issued to it were executed on the next tick.

A factory sim but with a world market to trade resources with other players. The market would not have any sort of standard currency, but instead every potential item or resource you can mine/manufacture is directly traded for other items/resources. This would create potential for arbitrage by savvy players.

The problem is, once you've created that kind of market, everything needs to be handled server-side to prevent clients from cheating and using hacked save files to give themselves tons of resources and making the market worthless.

The cloud compute costs for running thousands of factories could get expensive. I suppose factories of offline players could be abstracted away. ie, "You produced X widgets in ten minutes, then went offline for an hour, so when you come back, you will have 6*X widgets".

The world always needs more 3D platformers.

An RTS or turn based one where all units start as villagers, but you can’t actually command them to do anything; you can only incentivize behaviors for instance by assigning cash bonuses to those actions (except for villagers who join the military, which you can order). The more they do certain actions, the more they get skilled at that action. But as the game progresses, depending on your strategy certain actions may become obsolete, or you may need to rebalance; but the more developed a villager’s skill is, the harder it is to retrain them. So basically the game would be one where the more you lean into one direction the harder it gets to pivot.