Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

YES PLZ!

I loved reading the Borrowers books as a kid and would play tf out of this game haha

I love horror games and I love dungeon crawlers. If I ever made a videogame, which is becoming less and less likely, it would be a procedurally generated mansion that was something like Betrayal at House on the Hill meets Slay the Spire.

You'd have some main antagonist haunting the mansion that you want to defeat, accessible in one of the rooms you need to discover. All throughout the mansion are artifacts that can make you stronger at defeating the boss, but picking up these artifacts usually triggers some haunting mechanic that makes general traversal through the mansion more difficult. One might turn the inanimate statues scattered throughout the mansion into active enemies. One might trigger a slenderman-type stalker mechanic. One might cause the mansion to start collapsing on itself, so each room starts losing floor tiles in ways that make some of them no longer traversible. One might rerandomize the layout of the mansion.

It becomes a balance of collecting enough powerful items to be able to defeat the boss, but not so many that the environment becomes too hostile to reach the boss at all, causing you to succumb to the mansion.

Then add a few other mechanics like events that autotrigger when you enter a room so it becomes not in your best interest to explore the entire mansion before you start collecting items.

I had this idea a while ago, and it just never materialized:

- Every player can use their tablets or phones, and as many as they'd like

- Each device can be assigned with different controls

    - Wasn't sure if this would be decided before the game starts or if some player could control it, or if anyone can just add in controls as needed

 - The game plays only on the ship bridge, there would be no first-person anything

 - One device acts as the viewer screen

Scenarios would be things like escorting a ship through hostile space, delivering cargo, peace treaties, or search and destroy. One thing I wanted is the game to favour fun over realism. Like a player could go rogue and navigate the ship anywhere they wanted, or start firing on a friendly ship. Controls should be easy, like navigation could be as easy as scanning for nearby locations and then picking it, letting the computer plot a course.

I liked the idea of players all hanging out in a living room, connect the "viewer" player to a TV, and just have fun. Some scenarios and situations would involve teamwork, like having an engineer reroute power from navigation (ie nav has to slow down to make power available) to weapons for more powerful shots.

I thought it would be fun to build, but I just didn't have the time to develop it myself.

I've been dying for a cyber punk or Sci fi loot based ARPG. All the ones that exist are some flavor of fantasy with the exception of Borderlands and Destiny, but those are FPSs and I prefer the Diablo/Path of Exile approach.

I keep thinking about a mech based ARPG where you can attach different components to your mech that grant different passive/active abilities. Maybe different mech styles that have different passive abilities, but, in the spirit of Path of Exile, the components you equip are not limited by class.

I'm just tired of all ARPGs doing Gothic fantasy horror type stuff when there's so many unexplored options that could revitalize the genre. Give me lightsabers instead of swords, guns instead of bows, and drones instead of totems. Let me fight in cities and spaceships instead of villages and castles. There's just so much you can do with Sci fi.

A long, long, long, time ago I had a conversation with a Unix consultant at my Dad's business; his hobby was flying stunt planes with a twist: each plane had a 100 yard long ribbon tied to the tail; the winner was the pilot who landed with the longest tail.

This would be a terrific non-violent flight combat game; you could imagine with modern graphics and even VR it could be very satisfying.

Further, the consultant lost his license for a couple of years when he evaded an opponent by illegally flying under a highway overpass and a passer-by reported his plane's ID to the FAA; that could be a mechanic itself, extra risky maneuvers that had a chance of some big negative effect.