Eli Dupree @elidupree@mastodon.social

Bad game idea of the day: Eldritch horror Asteroids-like where increasingly bizarre things start happening to anything that screenwraps… And of course, you can't *see* it happening…

Bad game idea of the day: The Checkpoint Scoffer, a game where you play as the companion character of an (AI) player who is bad at the game, but refuses to use checkpoints, so you both keep getting sent back to the beginning. You have to push the player into the checkpoints in order to get further into the game.

Bad TV show idea of the day: Someone finds a magic ring that gives them Protection from Evil, preventing their mind from being manipulated by the forces of evil. They immediately lose their job because they can no longer accept unreasonable requests from their boss. The rest of the show is a philosophical comedy about them trying to live a "normal" life, but being unable to, because so much of what's "normal" is influenced by corporate greed, xenophobia, rape culture, etc.

So, you know how Dark Souls bosses are so massive that their absolute speed is faster than the tip of your sword while you're swinging it, meaning that realistically, it should work almost as well to just hold out your sword and let them impale themselves on it?

Bad game idea of the day: A game where you do exactly that

Or better yet, you plant spikes in the environment and then dodge, because your arm wouldn't survive that

Bad game idea of the day: Asymmetric multiplayer FPS where you're a team of soldiers trying to fight off AI enemies, but one player is the "commander" who can give orders (which other players must obey to the letter), and the commander is trying to make you lose

Bad game idea of the day: Art heist/trolley problem game where you control a trolley that's barreling through an art gallery and you have to choose which way to go (you get extra points for destroying the most expensive art)

Bad game idea of the day: Undertale-style fourth wall breaking with "Planescape: Torment"-style dialogue trees where you can argue the final boss into believing that they were wrong about the game's narrative framing

Bad game idea of the day: You are given a purely random dataset, and your challenge is to misuse statistics to make it look like there are correlations when there actually aren't.

The theme could be either p-fishing (you are scientists trying to get published in what "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" calls a "null field"), or machine learning (you're selling a "trained model" that secretly just encodes the answers used to evaluate it).

Bad game idea of the day: Wall Upgrader, a tower defense game where there are no towers, only walls. The enemies continuously attack the walls, and never die. You need to keep upgrading the walls to increase their hitpoints fast enough to indefinitely stall the enemies.

Bad game idea of the day: A game called "Automate Literally Everything", where the start button is labeled "Automate playing the game", and after you click it, you don't have to press any more buttons for the rest of the game

Bad game idea of the day: Incremental game where the premise is that your character starts out addicted to incremental games, and the resource you're accumulating is "time spent doing anything other than playing incremental games"

Bad game idea of the day: A game with a "cheats" menu, and also a micro-transaction that does nothing but relabel the "cheats" menu into the "legitimate gameplay customizations" menu

Bad game idea of the day: Minigolf MOBA

Bad game idea of the day: A platformer where you can easily get into a groove where you're moving really fast and gracefully through the levels… But your main goal is to avoid doing that, and you have to keep finding ways to bonk into obstacles at the wrong angle to reset your speed to zero

Bad plot twist idea of the day: The characters find some documents written by aliens, which say that a certain gate can only be opened by aliens with "extracognitive abilities". But when they get to the gate, it turns out that any human can open it, because "extracognitive abilities" means anything that's not purely cognitive, i.e. the ability to take physical actions.

Bad story idea of the day: The evil government uses experimental, mind-altering drugs on a group of kids, to engineer a Genius Kid to do their bidding… except, as-written, the main kid isn't much of a genius. At first, you think it's just bad writing. But then it turns out, the real effect of the drugs was to make everyone gullible enough to THINK the kid was a genius, and it was just an evil social experiment.

Bad game idea of the day: A roguelike where the "select an upgrade" screen pops up without warning and deliberately uses exactly the same buttons as normal gameplay, so a major part of the challenge is having fast enough reaction time to avoid accidentally selecting the wrong upgrade

Bad game idea of the day: Alien Bigot Detective. You've been hired by an alien to investigate some other aliens to find out which of them are bigots. You collect evidence in the form of statements like "Aphuj said Galyx is a daq!", and you don't know whether "daq" is a neutral descriptor, a slur, a type of criminal, or what. You can ask the aliens what the words mean, but you don't understand their explanations either – your main feedback is whether they get angry at you for asking or not.

Bad game idea of the day: Skill Tree Hero, a game where skill trees are the ONLY game mechanic!

"That sounds like a decent idea for an incremental game," you say.

Except it's not an incremental game, it's a puzzle game, where you get softlocked if you don't buy the skills in the right order.

Bad TV show idea of the day: Protagonist finds a note from their future self… no, wait, it's from someone ELSE's future self, and the someone else is a huge jerk! The note has loads of specific advice about the best ways to lie, cheat, and steal on specific days in the future. Our hero tries to figure out how to use this information for good, while also trying to discover who wrote the note so they can stop their misdeeds.