I read an idea a long while back that I’ll repeat:

A spy game in the style of Splinter Cell, except you aren’t the guy, you’re his handler. You tell him “crawl under that laser,” or “wait a moment, there’s a guard… okay now go!” or “input the following sequence to disable the doomsday device,” and he more or less listens to what you tell him to do. The issue is that the more you fuck up and get him hurt or killed, the less likely he is to listen to you. So you have to build up a relationship with your spy by giving him good instructions in a timely fashion and getting him to complete missions successfully. Over the course of the game, as you progress, you’d be able to tell him to do more dangerous things because he’d trust you more. Playing the game successfully would make you feel like you and your spy were a well-oiled machine, working together to take down supervillains and criminal syndicates.

Simulator Game Simulator where you play a guy playing a simulator game and have to make sure he doesn’t forget to sleep or get fired but manages to successfully plow that virtual field every time.

Utility Locator Simulator.

You know those “Call 811 before you dig!” signs? (Or, where I grew up, call JULIE?)

In the real world, underground utilities are generally found by utility locators using tools that detect current running through either a metal pipe or wires, or through a tracer wire if the pipe isn’t iron/steel. Utility locators do tickets called into 811, and go about neighborhoods (both city and rural) marking with paint on the ground where gas/electric/fiber/sewer/water/etc. utilities are, prior to construction where digging will happen.

I feel like it’d be really fun to simulate someone using one of the detectors and having to go to some street location, find the utility pedestals or hookups to homes or businesses, and trace the lines and paint where they go.

You could base it in real science like a lot of simulators out there, too. There’s different techniques and frequencies you can use to detect underground utility lines, and different ways they can interfere with one another so that things go wrong and your markings are off.

And the whole process of locating utilities could be very, very gamified. You could get a score on how well you marked them, and terrible things could happen if you were wrong.

Like, maybe you marked a gas line incorrectly, so the next contractor to dig hits it and gets blown sky high when things explode. Or maybe an office building/school/whatever had to be emergency evacuated because your poor marking caused a gas leak when construction started.

Or maybe you located the cable fiber to 200 homes in a neighborhood wrong, and an excavator cut it, and suddenly all those homes can’t watch the Superbowl and the “happiness” of the neighborhood goes down.

Or you located a water or sewer line wrong, and suddenly someone’s back yard is filled with water/sewage and little Timmy gets sick and dies because his wading pool is full of poo.

And you could get things to level up, too. Like, if you do good work and move to a better utility locator company, maybe they issue you a can of wasp spray.

Or perhaps you befriend a beekeeper and they can come out and remove a swarm off of your utility pedestal so you don’t get stung to death, and you can save the bees instead of killing them. Get an Environmentally Friendly badge achievement or something.

Or you raise relationships with the construction contractors so they mark their locator tickets better so your job is easier. (Or you piss them all off, and they tell you to mark ALL utilities for three high-traffic blocks…when the only digging they’re doing is a single stump in someone’s back yard, far away from the horrible convoluted intersections you were forced to mark.) Or maybe homeowners like you, so they stop surrounding “ugly” utility pedestals on their properties with rose bushes so you don’t have to crawl through thorns to get to it.

I think it could be very fun, and also kinda raise awareness of what utility locators do and why.

Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world

Excavation Simulator.

Just put all resources into simulating dirt well, then make a game about driving various power equipment. A sandbox game, where you just build whatever you want. VR would be fun.

I just want a life sim with reasonably believable NPCs. Dwarf Fortress is the only game I’ve seen really attempt something like this, where NPCs act intelligently, and you can ask them about topics and events dynamically.

Essentially, I want a game where the NPCs are capable of doing everything the player can, so I could start a shop and give out quests myself, if I want.

I’ve actually been “working” on a project like this. It’s a huge undertaking, but who knows, maybe I’ll get there one day.

I’ve had this one in my head because I genuinely thought it existed.

Tank Crew Simulator. It’s like Fury where you’re in a little tank with three other guys. Your view of the world is through a tiny slit in the metal or if you decide you want to risk getting your head blown off, you can open your hatch. If you’re the loader, make sure the main gun operator has a round loaded into the cannon. If you’re driving, don’t be that guy who runs over an anti-tank mine. As the gunner, it’s your duty to keep your head connected to your shoulders.

I’ve wanted to create a game that’s a simulation of mental health issues. For instance, youre playing someone who has autism. You turn to walk down a street. Turn to look, touch, car crash horns, screaming. Touch a wall, textures explode, patterns etching into your outstretched arm. Or, one about ptsd. Another about auditory processing disorder.

My IRL reality can be so hypervivid, intense, super saturated, surreal. Often wish someone else could experience it, know what it’s like.

In college I made a game called Freefall Simulator. The idea was to make a game with the goal of making the player motion sick, as if they were falling.

It worked, a little too well.

I had to play it for hours on end.

Happiness.

Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.

Unionization simulator. Talk to coworkers, see who is supportive. Risk revealing too much to soon to someone who runs to the bosses.

Also strike simulator as a sequel.

Revolution simulator for the trilogy.

The one I’ve had in my head for a while is a “Factory” simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you’d actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.

Maybe it exists already but I’d love a good hiking simulator for a console where when you take stunning snapshots you could send them to your phone and use as backgrounds.

A rocket design simulator in the same sort of vein as kerbal space program or juno new origins/simplerockets, but as realistic as reasonably possible and with as many options as can reasonably be programmed in (so for example, rather than just placing an engine or getting to specify a couple parameters like nozzle size, you’d have to specify the power cycle and number of combustion chambers per turbopump, size and construction material of various major components, fuel and oxidizer type, etc)

For years I’ve been wanting a simulator simulator simulator. It’s like those simulator simulator games you’ve played except it’s simulating the next level up, playing the people who built the simulator simulator.