Lately I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity (which is really good, BTW) and I noticed that the game has been tracking one of my favorite pieces of game-tech: Unity engine.
The first game in the series uses painted backgrounds and animated sprites and it looks great. The second game uses the newer Unity engine that includes 3D renderings. It also blew the top off of load-times; the game’s memory footprint appears to have godzilla-sized. I don’t particularly care (the first games I played had to load on punched paper tape, manually installed in the reader) but I’ve had Unity engine on my mind, in the back of my mind, the last few days.
OK, so this morning some commenter on Daily Kos said something funny about how much fun they have imagining Trump being dragged kicking and screaming out of the Oval Office and that crossed the beams with the Unity thought-train, and the result was a multi-million-dollar idea. You’re welcome to it, if you have some art, animation, and audio skills. Here we go: do a castle defense game in which you play (naturally) Donald Trump, trying to hang on to the Oval Office.
The game is a series of levels of increasing difficulty. You start out with basic weapons: you can stack furniture or throw it, to drive back secret service agents who are trying to come in and drag you out. You also can target foes with Tweets, which cause them to explode or something. As you play up the levels, you get assists who come in with super powers, like Jared Kushner who comes in and runs around doing nothing. Or Ivanka who kicks people. Or Melania who doesn’t care. You fight madly and as you level up you get new powers like that you can fling poop, tweetstorm, and summon burning dumpsters (brought by Rudi Giuliani). Of course the enemies do various things other than just sending waves of secret service to drag you out, they also send subpoenas you can ignore, or COVID, or whatever. 
Naturally, the bosses get tougher and the waves get bigger and the action gets crazier and crazier until – if you make it to the final boss, Hillary Clinton rips the whole back off the Oval Office and Barack Obama reaches in and squishes you like Panic Pete and yanks you out and throws you into a jail cell with Bill Barr and all your friends.
Since most computers now have some kind of microphone, I’d make the audio samples in-game editable (via an option tab) so you could record your own sound patches for the secret service agents to say. “My eye! I have poop in my eye!” or whatever.
Throw it together Trump-fast and Trump-dirty and sell the hell out of it on app stores for the next 40 days, cha-ching!
I’m only slightly joking. The gaming world is a great place to make a gymbag of money with a smash-and-grab app. The kind of money that is achievable can be truly remarkable. If you could get it on Facebook, you’d make a bazillion dollzars – and best of all, bazillionaires don’t have to pay any taxes anymore so you could keep it all!
Reminds me of the flash-game era. Probably would sell, Obama squishing Trump is the Libs wet dream.
I remember starting the first Pillars of Eternity, really liking it, but for some weird reason i stopped playing after the first 4 hours of gameplay.
Need to hire This guy for the Trump voiceover.
Aw man, Pillars of Eternity!
Love that game – I’ve got the second one ready for when I finish the first.
That being said, I’ve also got a mod running on the first one to make it work more like Baldur’s Gate, ie. better spell recovery.
Also, I have miscellaneous complaints, especially about the stats. A lot of people, myself included, need stats that are more clearly interpretable (eg. DnD’s Str-Dex-Con-Int-Wis-Cha) for them to really bridge the mechanical and roleplay aspects.
Ah well, no game is perfect. I love all the little side-stories and interactions in PoE, they really make it come to life, especially the special interactions where you need a certain amount of insight or a grappling hook or what have you.
I gave myself a treat before Christmas and I started to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 and I am quite enjoying it so far and it looks like it will last me for over a year. Pillars of eternity were recommended to me too.
I do not think I would enjoy your idea as a game though. But sadly there really may be people who would buy it, especially if you threw some MAGA shit in there and gave Donny Trumpet some QANON superpowers.
Tranquilizer dart gun.
You’re welcome.
Divinity Original Sin, also great game I enjoyed a lot.
But agreed the real money is on the MAGA side. They love being grifted. Just make a shitty game where Ben Garrison style Trump has to beat Hillary, Obama, #TheDeepState and Biden (who are all Antifa communists for some reason) to thwart election theft => make piles of Money. Free advertising too, Trump will 100% tweet about it.
The “clear all enemies” superweapon of desperation could be a self-pardon, dropping only very rarely. Or maybe that’s the extra life you after so many points. (Ooh, don’t call them points, call them votes! Hitpoints = Electoral votes? Now we’re headed for lawsuits = health packs territory, with voter suppression givng you a slow health regeneration boost. The possibilities are endless, just like these brackets.)
Charly@#3:
I gave myself a treat before Christmas and I started to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 and I am quite enjoying it so far and it looks like it will last me for over a year. Pillars of eternity were recommended to me too.
I’ll second the recommendation on POE.
I’m really biased, though. I like games that have a combat system that is a good mix of tactics and strategy. Divinity and POE (and Dragon Age, fwiw) have a feature that I love: you can sit back and let your player characters’ AI fight battles for you, or you can pause the action and get down into the details and micro-manage. It’s great for control freaks like me and it subtly rewards a player for adding their brain-power to the game because fights you direct tend to go much better (and therefore be more satisfying) than just the AI.
Besides, it’s huge fun to pause in the middle of a battle and pan the camera around, looking at the expressions on everyone’s face as they fly around, get smashed and burned, or whatever.
Reginald Selkirk@#4:
Tranquilizer dart gun.
And a white overcoat and a great big net. All white. Perfect.
Perhaps Dr Fauci could appear as one of the boss levels.
aquietvoice@#2:
Also, I have miscellaneous complaints, especially about the stats. A lot of people, myself included, need stats that are more clearly interpretable (eg. DnD’s Str-Dex-Con-Int-Wis-Cha) for them to really bridge the mechanical and roleplay aspects.
I agree, although I remember (back around 1976…) wonder “WTF is ‘constitution’?”
But since POE is claiming D&D ancestry, I wish they had stuck a bit closer with the familiar.
I like their approach to character classes/half classes and how you level up/learn. Figuring out the optimal way to use your party is a whole strategy game in itself and it makes me very happy to get stuck into all those details.
The enchanting system is OK but I have trouble seeing what the various things mean. Too much detail and consequently I ignore it.
Marcus Ranum @#9:
Yeah, the POE enchanting system for me boiled down to “click the buttons occasionally and see if any good options were highlighted”.
It actually had the dual problem of being too simple and too complicated at the same time, never good.
The effects were mechanically simple but overall hard to read, and the resources needed for them were pretty random, and they never really changed much of anything important.
I’ve been enjoying the stronghold aspect a lot though thus far – I haven’t gotten any tax money but slowly upgrading the place and exploring the endless paths is fun. :)