if you remember them, post in this thread the videogame ideas you thought up as a kid
animals of farthing wood: the game - the easiest way to describe this would be as a single plane beat em up, in which you play as fox and you go around killing fox hunters and deforesters
online rpg concept - final fantasy vii being my first non-action rpg, and also a game that really caught my imagination, i started thinking about how a multiplayer version might work. all the menus and stuff meant that it’d have to be online so everyone has their own screen. it was very different to mmorpgs as we know them, though. the game would still be a semi-linear, finite story that you and your friends would play through. no character creation, you’d each pick one of the characters from the game’s story. in towns, you’d be free to go individually around and explore as you like. in the wilderness, the party would move as one, and the battles would be atb like final fantasy vii, with everyone picking their own options when their character’s bar was full. the players in your party would be the only players in the world, it wasn’t massively multiplayer.
mmo deathmatch idea - there would be a world map with the graphics level being similar to the first two gta games. however, the map would be “as big as the real planet earth”. you would log in spawn at a random location, and your aim is to just survive in this world for as long as possible, while killing as many other players as possible. the big catch is that while conventional weapons are pretty common, and you could even try beating someone to death with your bare hands, there would also be secret bases hidden at certain locations. each one would have a super weapon. there were nuclear missiles, mechagodzilla, deadly plagues, and so on.
battle royale: the videogame - of course, it was the turn of the century, and everyone loved the movie battle royale. so i was thinking about how it would work as a game. you got to make your character (though they’d be a high school student, of course), and you went into a big deathmatch on an island with a randomly assigned weapon, just like in the movie. most of the opponents would be ai, but it could have up to 4 player splitscreen (because we were also playing a lot of q3a on dreamcast and timeplitters 2 on gamecube)
I definitely daydreamed hard about a 4-player, co-op class based FPS that was set in a huge procedurally generated city. Like you take the TFC classes and played them in Left 4 Dead but the map was like… Liberty City but fully realized, every building enterable and so on. The dial set like two or three notches further toward the tac shooter or milsim end of the spectrum; you’d have to manage supplies, map reading and orienteering would be important. Infil, accomplish [objective], exfil. I imagined it with a slick near-future aesthetic with the PCs having some sort of exoskeleton or other tech-suit to justify cool Crackdown-like powers. Bad guys could be whatever, robots or aliens or something, definitely nothing too true-to-life or headline-ripped.
Helldivers 2 is like 40% of the way there… probably why I like it so much…
Platformer…about a striped cat that was kind of a greatest hits of every sidescrolling platformer ever. Also in 3d with every 3d platformer feature ever.
Neverhood but Metroidvania, before I had a word for that. I still dislike that word for all action adventure games with a contiguous world but, eh.
Both of these projects had extensive lore.
I also had this one idea that was like…a dungeon crawler but it was on a grid like a tactics game, and you had four totally seperate characters in a different part of this huge tower and somehow they each had to do stuff on their own that combined together, presumably you’d eventually get to a point where they could finally meet up. This one feels like it probably could have legs if I wanted to actually do anything with it.
Oh, and, of course, how could I forget, a jrpg with Fallout style isometric hex grid combat, where each character was defined as like a cultural stereotype + weapon type (Scottish guy with heavy weapons, Arab guy with SMGs, anime girl with psychic powers, bishounen werewolf, etc.), inspired more by Wild Arms than anything else. Insanely generic, embarrassing even to remember.