Ideas that haven't become games yet. Most of them showed up while I was peeling sticks. Some are mechanics, some are worlds, some are just a thought I didn't want to lose.
seed just an idea sketched has notes or drawings prototyped something playable exists
Four I keep coming back to
Bow & Arrow seed
Every mean thing you say is an arrow you have to draw and shoot yourself.
Everyone carries a bow. Say something cruel and you draw. The more it hurts, the harder you pull; the more people watching, the heavier the bow gets. Someone you hit can pull the arrow out and shoot it back, but it wounds them too. And the harder anyone draws, the more likely it snaps back into their own hand.
Why I like it: the rules are the message. Nobody has to tell you that hurting people costs you; the bow does.
Fragments seed
You can only say what you've heard.
You arrive with no words. Talking to people, listening, you collect fragments: half-phrases, single words. You snap them together to say things, and saying things earns you more fragments. Your vocabulary is literally the people you've met.
Why I like it: language as inventory. Dialogue trees where the tree is something you grew.
Foreign Kitchen seed
A cooking game where nothing in the kitchen is from your world.
All the tools, all the ingredients, none of them familiar. You want to make one specific dish. You have to figure out the recipe by trying things, failing, and paying attention to what happened. Other dishes unlock as you understand more.
Why I like it: it's a cooking game about learning, not about following a recipe.
The Scope seed
A tiny scope shows you the past, then the future, then why prophets speak in riddles.
Look through it at the people you love and you see their past; you understand them better. Look forward and you see a future you don't want, so you try to change it, and can't. Then someone tells you to stop looking for one future and hold all of them at once, and what the scope shows turns abstract. That's why prophecies are riddles: the prophet isn't sure either.
Why I like it: a mechanic that changes what the game looks like as the character's thinking changes.
The rest of the drawer (mechanic · world · narrative · meta)
Judgment
You die and get all the power in the world. It's actually the test: given everything, who are you?
narrativemeta
Runaway Cursor
A cursor that jumps around a desktop clicking things on its own. Each app does something different when it lands.
mechanic
Nonsense Dream
Everything is nonsense. You piece together the backstory by making sense of it anyway.
narrativeworld
Other People
A time-loop story where you go back as other people to stop something your past self set in motion.
narrative
The Forgotten Hero
A hero the world is slowly forgetting, trying to keep up with a world that's moving on.
narrative
4D Photos
Overlap photos taken across time to fake a fourth dimension.
mechanicart
Unfinished: the boss
For the visual novel: before you can leave, you fight the creator. How hard depends on how you answered the fishing-club poster. Win, and you're offered a new identity in a working world, on the condition that you keep it, with the boss watching from inside as another character.
unfinishednarrative
Fragments not games. just thoughts.
dimensions0D is 1 point, 1D is 2, 2D is 4, 3D is 8. So 4D is 16 points?
musicSomething that feels like a back alley, but also like fantasy, and slightly unreal.
musicGodly music that is calm but judging. Voice reference: Polyphemus. Low notes.
