Eli Dupree @elidupree@mastodon.social

Bad horror setting idea of the day: A small town that seems ordinary at first, but once you've been there for a while, you start hearing scare chords play from nowhere when moderately surprising things happen. That's all, there's no other spooky stuff.

Bad game idea of the day: A physical trading card game where every card printed is torn into several pieces and distributed across multiple booster packs. To play the game at all, you must trade with other players to find the other pieces of the same individual cards.

Bad game idea of the day: You are a security system engineer for the SCP Foundation. You must design CCTV/etc systems that can safely detect containment breaches by creatures with abilities like "able to travel through electrical wiring" and "able to possess anyone who sees a picture of it".

Also, it's a real-time roguelite where you keep getting sent briefings about new creatures you need to begin monitoring immediately, and sometimes the briefings have vital information redacted.

Bad story idea of the day: Vampires, being immortal, have little to worry about from ordinary death, but they are dependent on humans, so they are particularly concerned about existential threats to humanity. A shadowy cabal of vampires begins hunting down the politicians and energy executives responsible for climate change. The vampires are the protagonists

Game idea of the day: a game about negotiating with people to get what you want, but the most important game mechanics are about figuring out the limits of what they're okay with so you can avoid "convincing" them so hard that it becomes coercing them into things that violate their boundaries.

Bad story idea of the day: Advanced aliens arrive on Earth and announce their interest in "uplifting sapient species". They proceed to uplift dolphins, elephants, etc. by helping them develop technology comparable to that of humans.

(Feel free to utilize this line whenever some grammar snob tries to correct you. I don't care whom they are, we won't let them get away with it many farther.)

Some people think it's bad grammar to say "less apples". But frankly, I couldn't care fewer.

Bad game idea of the day: Actually That's a Common Misconception. In this party game, the first player makes a statement, then the second player invents a reason why the first statement is a common misconception. The third player invents a reason why the second player's explanation is a common misconception, and so forth, going around in a circle.

Bad game idea of the day: a "disability experience" game which is just a hard platformer where no human player can get past the first level because their reaction time isn't fast enough.

Bad sci-fi idea of the day: The year is 2500 and all humans are sincerely motivated by the common good. However, their economy is still cutthroat capitalism. All corporations use automatic burglar robots to stay competitive. All employees try to stop their own corp from burgling, but when they succeed, it folds and they have to get new jobs elsewhere. In the end, the only corps left are the ones with burglar-bot systems so convoluted that nobody can figure out how to shut them down.

Bad game idea of the day: Line of Spite, a tactical RPG where your enemies can shoot around corners and you can't

Best game idea of the day: Auto Lock Off, a 3D shooter where you want to shoot the enemies, but they're all standing next to barrels and other random junk, and if you point at them, your weapon automatically locks onto the random junk instead. It's a complex strategy where you have to either find just the right angle where you can lock onto the enemy, or lock onto a piece of junk and then put the enemy between you and the junk, or just kill all the junk before you can kill the enemy.

Bad game idea of the day: a detective game where you must gather forensic evidence to determine which way the bonus treasures are hidden and which way will lock you into a cutscene that advances the plot

Bad horror movie idea of the day: A series of innocent people are possessed by a being that calls itself a "Player", and each one dies after the Player forces them to perform increasingly dangerous feats to sate its craving for "Achievements" and "Collectibles".

Bad game idea of the day: An AAR (Augmented Augmented Reality) game. It interacts with the APIs of one or more pre-existing AR games, and also adds its own content.

Bad game idea of the day: A fantasy-medieval city-building game where it's bad to build walls around your kingdom, because that keeps out immigrants who contribute to your kingdom's economy (a little like in Dwarf Fortress). But you can't just choose not to build walls – they get built automatically if your citizens' xenophobia score is too high.

Bad game idea of the day: Buzzword Tycoon. You spend all your time writing investment pitches and scamming investors, and none running an actual business.

Bad game idea of the day: The Broken Format, a cyberpunk CCG designed and carefully balanced around the assumption that the game will generally end on the first player's first turn.

I had a dream where there was a tabletop game about developing a scalable web app. Each turn, there was a random chance that your user count would increase to the next tier, which could be either good or bad depending on what upgrades you'd implemented already.