22
votes
Slush Idea Bin
Here's something I want to try, a sort of here's an idea thread for things you want to write down or think that are a good idea, but have no intention of exploring. All top level posts should be similar to shower thoughts in spontaneity, but allow you to further explore them should you choose to. Effectively, it's an Adopt a Thought!
A high school dating sim where you date social media platforms, call it Parasocial. Facebook is the student president know it all, Twitter is cute but damaged, etc. The date everybody ending has you spending the rest of your life trying to make them all happy, while you slowly lose yourself to complusive validation.
Pair-a-social! Dammit, past @moocow1452!
Reviving your topic is definitely an interesting experiment. And this dating sim instantly caught my attention, given the current state of the social media. I can easily imagine things like Twitter being a childhood friend who got radicalized and fell into Qanon, FB being the student president and pushing stuff in your face, Tumblr being the quiet wierdo who's way too chatty about fandoms and social justice, MySpace being the emo loner, etc.
A mobile phone app that uses computer vision to discover corporate logos in your camera's field of view.
Combined with a database of what companies are subsidiaries/parent companies to each other it could allow you to more easily boycott brands. You could blacklist Nestle and any logo of one of their many sub-brands would get matched and flagged.
Because logos are necessarily always exactly the same this isn't too hard of a problem to solve. The ownership database could be seeded automatically with information from Wikipedia. Crowdsourcing would take care of mistakes or gaps from this discovery process.
A city builder where you have to deal with climate change but all of your decisions have unintended consequences that ultimately result in losing the game. Without telling the player, it's impossible to win.
While not climate change, but that's more or less the idea behind Rise to Ruins. I mean... I'm on an digital hiatus, I'm not really here.
A crime scene investigation TV show set in an empire from Antiquity. Imagine CSI: Byzantium, for example. You could have a lot of fun with that.
Right? I remember thinking about that a couple years ago, while watching Warehouse 13. Wouldn't it be badass to see a whole crime series in ancient Rome, complete with the trial speeches and cameos by famous Roman figures? Really surprised no one seems to have explored that yet.
Sorry, Hollywood is too busy reboothing things to come up with fresh ideas.
I personally detest crime/cop/lawyer/doctor/political shows with a passion, but you bet I'd watch something like CSI: Ur, if it was historically and aesthetically consistent with what we know.
And then end it with a punishment from the legal code of the time, which certainly would be bloody and informative.
A linear, story-driven videogame where 97% of players are presented with the story as usual but 3% of players experience a version that, while mostly the same, has several major differences in the plot. At no point is this ever mentioned, hinted at, or acknowledged, either in-game or by the devs, leading to disagreement on the actual game itself in discussions, with both sides justifiably believing they're correct.
Raising an old thread to see if it can be given new life.
Well, isn't this a nice little visit back to simpler times? Cannot add a vote to the main topic now, I suppose there is a time limit.
Yep. 30 days.
glad u did cuz the post by u/Diet_Coke is hilarious
edit: this is low key r/writingprompts haha any writers in here?
Writer, definitely browsing through these for ideas! Already getting some ideas of my own from this.
so far the most cursed is a Tildes-inspired visual novel with a horror twist called TildesuI made a lil post, hopefully people post some prompts! I even posted a prompt and a reply from an author from a long time ago hopefully gets the ball rolling
A Dungeon Core story set in a modern world, where the CEO of a small AI research company is absorbed into his own system and then tries to keep things going while hiding his new inhuman status. I'd call it Core Executive Officer.
An annual security/compliance training for corporations that eschews the traditional slide-show and multiple choice test format and has you play an RPG with compliance, security incident, sexual harassment, etc. scenarios instead.
I really wanted to do this but I lack the combination of time and motivation.
A SF visual novel where a depressed woman travels to a space colony as a "fairwell cruise" before she kills herself. When she wakes up from hypersleep she slowly discovers that she is actually in a simulation created by the ship's AI in an effort to understand her so it can inhabit her brain.
Near the end you learn that the AI will certainly be discovered to be sentient after pulling this stunt, which will lead to humans to terminate it. The player will have choice on which life to save, hopefully prompting the player to examine how they value life.
A dating app partnered with or based on "The Bachelor"
On Sunday night, women open a lobby with 20 spots. Guys sign up for spots if they're interested. Throughout the week, she cuts guys on a schedule. By Saturday, she picks 1 or rejects all. Rejected guys can re-up next Sunday, and while they wait, enter "Paradise" mode, which is just normal swiping to keep users from getting bored.
The "endgame" module for XScreensaver, but it allows you to point it at a folder of PGN files, playing out a whole game and showing any annotations in the file. And cross platform, needless to say.
A dog leash with a tension sensor. Emits a noise when pulled to a configurable threshold.
A fleet of autonomous, solar powered carbon capture drones. These large, zero-emission devices would roam the skies, vacuuming up CO₂ and converting it to raw industrial materials for low-cost carbon nanotube manufacturing. Then we can both reduce the rate of climate change, and make space elevator development more realistic.
An idea I've had in passing for years: a sitcom about daily life in a secure settlement in a zombie apocalypse setting. Inspired by how zombie shows always have to end with the settlements destroyed due to human hubris so they can have drama, and me wondering how to get around that.
It would be a sitcom built on a lot of dark humor. Right now, only idea I've got is a running gag that one guy's love interests always end up being zombified or turns out to be some disruptor who would eventually throw the settlement into chaos if not stopped.
I've always thought there ought to be a drive-through fast food joint that sells hearty stews and soups. I'd call it "Stu's." Imagine being able to stop by on the way to work on a cold day and get a thermos full of soup for breakfast.
I figure the items could be cooked in large quantities to make it more economical. It'd be amazing in winter, but I suppose unprofitable in summer.
I've never heard of anything like this in Australia. Does it exist in other countries?
An Open Source Digital Competive Card Game, pay what you want for the core set and challenges, official and community approved expansions for free, and easily moddable for experimental cards and alternative game modes. Ideally it be like Pixel Dungeon, where a fork is the better version.
A historical weather API to try and get a vibe check on "normal" weather.
Something that a person could use to answer a question like, "if I were to visit Burlington, Vermont in the first week of April, how cold or snowy is it usually?"
I'm not going to build that shit, but if somebody does, hit me up so I can connect to it from one of my bots.
Yeah like that, but a distilled version as an API response I can have a telegram bot give me. I know, it's not reasonable, it's just a fun little thing I do
A monthly recurring version of this topic, or is it pretty evergreen?
A Pokemon game mode/clone, where you venture into a massive cave. Leave your team and inventory at the door, every floor is a new biome, and each level you restock with a couple assorted items, every 10, you also get a single Pokeball. 100 levels down, you reach the bottom and engage a legendary.
So basically a Pokemon version of the Ancient Cave from Lufia 2?
Yeah, I was thinking how to do a Nuzlocke Randomizer run and justify it within a Pokemon game.