- Warzone taxi / ambulance driver. I discovered this with GTA San Andreas: cheats "all pedestrians armed" and "all pedestrians fight", then run taxi and ambulance missions. I guess this could just be a game mode in GTA. Putting in the cheat codes is tedious, especially since it's usually nice to also do the 100% armor code so you have some chance of actually completing multiple drop-offs, so a separate game or a dedicated game mode that wrapped it all up together would be cool. Courier, et c., would also be cool roles. Crazy chaotic urban warfare in which you're not a main target, but you've got to get around the city, is the point.
- Tailspin / Tales of the Gold Monkey / Archer Danger Island flight/business sim. You run a scrappy barely-getting-by flight service in some fictional Pacific island chain with a backdrop that's more-or-less the late 1930s. Survive, upgrade your plane, buy more planes, hire more pilots, et c. Indiana jones vibes (one mission type could be flying Indy-like characters to and from whatever ruins they want to explore, in fact). Maybe some Sid Meyer's Pirates! elements, to a degree—but you've got a flying boat, not a pirate ship. But, yes, pirates should be there, and all kinds of other unsavory characters. Spies, simple cargo runs, smuggling, the occasional military skirmish. A little like some of those trade-oriented space sims, but the planets are islands and the space ships are planes. Presence of plot(s) optional but encouraged. Big extra points if there's some element of first-person play outside the planes. I'd be OK with the flight being anything between pretty-damn-realistic and fairly-arcadey-but-not-so-arcadey-you-can't-stall.
Then the ones that are just "why the hell is there no modern equivalent of this game?":
- 4+ player (including at least 4 for local play) Return Fire for modern consoles.
- Battletanx for modern consoles, w/ local multiplayer (um, feel free to rewrite the setting....)
- A tower-defense type game even half as ambitious and weird and genre-mashing as Dominus was.
Oldie but a goodie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)
> Tailspin / Tales of the Gold Monkey / Archer Danger Island flight/business sim.
You had me at TailSpin. A solid series set in a world built on air transport instead of the automobile. I guess you could call it Airpunk? Though I'd want the ability to fly a plane on a mission with an AI co-pilot that can take the wheel while I switch back to a first/3rd person view and can now freely run around the plane to battle air pirates that have boarded mid fight. And toss in forgiving physics so you can air surf like Kit Cloudkicker.
Back in the day there was a game called "Escape Velocity" that was essentially this but in space.
Terraria: 40-100M units sold
Hollow knight: 8-20M for just sold
Rimwirld: 4-9M units sold.
- Dwarf Fortress
- Stardew Valley
- going way back, Tetris
That being said it is still a good article that features a lot of interesting details, for example, his budget and what he spent it on. I’m also impressed he did this part time.
I think the lesson is: there are lots of people who make games, but that’s only half the battle. Perhaps the creator’s best shrewd business move was in obtaining this publicity? What if all he did was ask?
Next time all y'all engineers out there dog on your marketing and sales departments, don't forget that the relationship is symbiotic!
Kudos to him if he did, it paid off.
Today with tools like Godot and RPG Maker (regardless of how good or bad compared to others), I realize it is actually possible to build these games I used to dream about. But like the title of this article, I fear falling too deep down a rabbit hole now that i have a family and adult responsibilities.
But man does that inner 12-year fet super excited at the thought of building an 8-bit Dragon Warrior clone based on the old Middle Earth Role Playing TTRPG adventures.
THat's why i worry about the rabbit hole now, because those things are no longer an obstacle. Sure I'd have to skill up on RPG Maker, and buy some assets - maybe even jump down the additional rabbit hole of learning how to make the assets myself - but I really just think I'd go head first in and not look up for a while.
Trackmania is one, for example.
No idea how much the level layout and physics engine impacts gameplay though.
That looks cool.
The game looks also very unpolished. Not sure why this is posted.
You can play it here:
Video on the subject: https://youtu.be/EmyCy5pRMSg?t=520 The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6200138B1/en
There's a lot of game recently that have been trying to capture the late 90s aesthetics without the late 90s technical limitations. The Big Catch [2] and Cavern of Dreams [3], for example. I'd love to see an exploration of the appeal to that aesthetic, because I think there's something more to it than just the nostalgic / vintage appeal.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlq6fFOqI28
https://www.mobygames.com/game/26238/bhunter/
https://obscuritory.com/action/bhunter/
Image from the article: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d6f1660ab7a8096e3239a7a33c081...
BHunter: https://cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/10634620-bhunter-windo...
I think he'll regret the lack of kb/m support, though. And I wonder if releasing this as a personal product (instead of a corporation) is wise, considering it very closely imitates two separate IPs, and references others like Total Recall's Johnnycab.
If the main monetary expense for him was hiring voice actors, I assume he didn't license any Offspring songs or anything like that. Does that mean the game has no sound track, or that it has a sound track of free songs, or that he made all the songs himself?
Anyway, wish him well. Making a full game by yourself is a ton of work, and most people just give up on it after a few months, so that's especially impressive.
