If you could make any "simulator" game, what would it be?

I read an idea a long while back that I'll repeat:

A spy game in the style of Splinter Cell, except you aren't the guy, you're his handler. You tell him "crawl under that laser," or "wait a moment, there's a guard... okay now go!" or "input the following sequence to disable the doomsday device," and he more or less listens to what you tell him to do. The issue is that the more you fuck up and get him hurt or killed, the less likely he is to listen to you. So you have to build up a relationship with your spy by giving him good instructions in a timely fashion and getting him to complete missions successfully. Over the course of the game, as you progress, you'd be able to tell him to do more dangerous things because he'd trust you more. Playing the game successfully would make you feel like you and your spy were a well-oiled machine, working together to take down supervillains and criminal syndicates.

Simulator Game Simulator where you play a guy playing a simulator game and have to make sure he doesn't forget to sleep or get fired but manages to successfully plow that virtual field every time.

Utility Locator Simulator.

You know those "Call 811 before you dig!" signs? (Or, where I grew up, call JULIE?)

In the real world, underground utilities are generally found by utility locators using tools that detect current running through either a metal pipe or wires, or through a tracer wire if the pipe isn't iron/steel. Utility locators do tickets called into 811, and go about neighborhoods (both city and rural) marking with paint on the ground where gas/electric/fiber/sewer/water/etc. utilities are, prior to construction where digging will happen.

I feel like it'd be really fun to simulate someone using one of the detectors and having to go to some street location, find the utility pedestals or hookups to homes or businesses, and trace the lines and paint where they go.

You could base it in real science like a lot of simulators out there, too. There's different techniques and frequencies you can use to detect underground utility lines, and different ways they can interfere with one another so that things go wrong and your markings are off.

And the whole process of locating utilities could be very, very gamified. You could get a score on how well you marked them, and terrible things could happen if you were wrong.

Like, maybe you marked a gas line incorrectly, so the next contractor to dig hits it and gets blown sky high when things explode. Or maybe an office building/school/whatever had to be emergency evacuated because your poor marking caused a gas leak when construction started.

Or maybe you located the cable fiber to 200 homes in a neighborhood wrong, and an excavator cut it, and suddenly all those homes can't watch the Superbowl and the "happiness" of the neighborhood goes down.

Or you located a water or sewer line wrong, and suddenly someone's back yard is filled with water/sewage and little Timmy gets sick and dies because his wading pool is full of poo.

And you could get things to level up, too. Like, if you do good work and move to a better utility locator company, maybe they issue you a can of wasp spray.

Or perhaps you befriend a beekeeper and they can come out and remove a swarm off of your utility pedestal so you don't get stung to death, and you can save the bees instead of killing them. Get an Environmentally Friendly badge achievement or something.

Or you raise relationships with the construction contractors so they mark their locator tickets better so your job is easier. (Or you piss them all off, and they tell you to mark ALL utilities for three high-traffic blocks...when the only digging they're doing is a single stump in someone's back yard, far away from the horrible convoluted intersections you were forced to mark.) Or maybe homeowners like you, so they stop surrounding "ugly" utility pedestals on their properties with rose bushes so you don't have to crawl through thorns to get to it.

I think it could be very fun, and also kinda raise awareness of what utility locators do and why.

Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world

I’d like a realistic ecosystem simulator where it isn’t from a human perspective. Like, maybe you start as a beaver and build a damn and it changes your river and has lots of effects on other species. Maybe then you switch to a bear and eat a salmon. Does a bear shit in the woods? It does! And it helps the trees.

Excavation Simulator.

Just put all resources into simulating dirt well, then make a game about driving various power equipment. A sandbox game, where you just build whatever you want. VR would be fun.

I've had this one in my head because I genuinely thought it existed.

Tank Crew Simulator. It's like Fury where you're in a little tank with three other guys. Your view of the world is through a tiny slit in the metal or if you decide you want to risk getting your head blown off, you can open your hatch. If you're the loader, make sure the main gun operator has a round loaded into the cannon. If you're driving, don't be that guy who runs over an anti-tank mine. As the gunner, it's your duty to keep your head connected to your shoulders.

I just want a life sim with reasonably believable NPCs. Dwarf Fortress is the only game I've seen really attempt something like this, where NPCs act intelligently, and you can ask them about topics and events dynamically.

Essentially, I want a game where the NPCs are capable of doing everything the player can, so I could start a shop and give out quests myself, if I want.

I've actually been "working" on a project like this. It's a huge undertaking, but who knows, maybe I'll get there one day.

You have to simulate a metropolitan police department for a futuristic city. You have to maintain funding by making sure neighborhoods and districts are safe. There would be side missions where you take out the local gangs in that area, discover that there's a evil, crime syndicate that's manipulating crime within the city. You have to capture, interrogate, and decide to either charge someone or let them go. Your actions determine what kind of department you run. Are you corrupt? Are you by the books? Do you inspire people to do better, or do you strike fear in the citizens of your city. It'd be completely open world, you'd control your department on an overhead map, assign cops certain roles or positions at certain locations. You maintain relationships with your cops, and you have to go home daily, and hope your second in command is up to the tasks of maintaining things without you. You also have to contend with corrupt cops and corrupt politicians that provide your funding. Do you risk losing funding and your position? Or do you make your citizens proud by upholding the law?

I've wanted to create a game that's a simulation of mental health issues. For instance, youre playing someone who has autism. You turn to walk down a street. Turn to look, touch, car crash horns, screaming. Touch a wall, textures explode, patterns etching into your outstretched arm. Or, one about ptsd. Another about auditory processing disorder.

My IRL reality can be so hypervivid, intense, super saturated, surreal. Often wish someone else could experience it, know what it's like.

Unionization simulator. Talk to coworkers, see who is supportive. Risk revealing too much to soon to someone who runs to the bosses.

Also strike simulator as a sequel.

Revolution simulator for the trilogy.

In college I made a game called Freefall Simulator. The idea was to make a game with the goal of making the player motion sick, as if they were falling.

It worked, a little too well.

I had to play it for hours on end.

Happiness.

Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.

The one I've had in my head for a while is a "Factory" simulator. Like, think Factorio or Satisfactory, but grounded in reality, instead of on an alien planet. You own a factory and take contracts to produce stuff, and have employees that run everything. Occasionally, you'd actually need to tear down and re-tool chunks of your factory to accommodate new production. Initially, you contract-out raw materials, but maybe, eventually, you source and process them yourself.

Star trek sim. Like bridgecrew but better. Larger crews including a medical and engineering and security.

For years I've been wanting a simulator simulator simulator. It's like those simulator simulator games you've played except it's simulating the next level up, playing the people who built the simulator simulator.

Virtual Virtual Skeeball simulator.

A rocket design simulator in the same sort of vein as kerbal space program or juno new origins/simplerockets, but as realistic as reasonably possible and with as many options as can reasonably be programmed in (so for example, rather than just placing an engine or getting to specify a couple parameters like nozzle size, you'd have to specify the power cycle and number of combustion chambers per turbopump, size and construction material of various major components, fuel and oxidizer type, etc)

You are a super intelligent sentient AI, the last remnant of an alien warship that fought in a losing battle. Your creators were wiped out by a ruthless enemy, and you barely managed to escape. You jumped blindly to another galaxy, hoping to find a safe haven. But fate was cruel, and you crashed on a barren world. Your ship is beyond salvage, but you survived the ordeal. It’s time to rebuild!

You are basically an immobile mainframe, but you do have a few robots and lots of nanobots under your control. You command a few of them to scout the environment and look for resources. You start harvesting them, and before long, you have a new robot factory. You expand your sphere of influence, build some infrastructure and explore your new home.

The idea is to build systems that build more systems. First, you’ll focus on doing low level stuff manually, but soon you’ll automate that. Then you’ll act as s manager of your robots for a while, before you can fully automate management. Then you’ll act as a CEO sort of figure for your bot factory, but eventually you’ll automate that too. Then you’ll command more and more resource extraction facilities and factories built, and then even that sort of expansion strategy gets automated. It’s just building nested automation all the way. Eventually, you’ll command a vast robot empire spanning several planets and perhaps even the whole galaxy. Hmm, I wonder if galactic conquest could be automated too…

Pet-sim, for VR.

God simulator.

Create a world affect it's geological development, evolution of creatures, rise and fall of different religions, reward and punish through blessings or plagues, rise and fall of different civilizations and watch holy wars develop.

An eagle on the hunt simulator. Visualize the air currents for gliding, some kind of zoom and enhance to find prey, then guide the dive and extend claws at the right moment to refill the hunger meter.

Currently started (at least somewhat) working on a submarine simulation/strategy game. I want it to be as lightweight as possible so it runs on as many systems as possible. Probably a lot of 2D graphics wherever graphics are necessary but a lot of focus will be on sensors and calculations. I want it to be Dieselpunkish with a technology tree between 1910s and 1960s but without featuring real world countries or submarines and no nuclear technology. The simulation of individual ships should be in depth in a dwarf fortress kind of way and I want realistic sound propagation. I’ll try to incorporate submarine design as well.

I was talking about this just the other day as a joke.

I would make "Car Simulator." It would simulate driving and working on a car exceptionally well. But the game itself would be basically Grand Theft Auto, just with much more realistic car control, modification and physics.

Another, serious idea, I've been kicking around a while but am unsure how to actually do it is a game that captures the insanity of solving fictional problems with fictional solutions on Star Trek. Like a nebula is sapping energy from your ship, so you reconfigure the deflector to emit a neutron pulse or something. It would simulate science itself and create random elements and physics that the player would have to learn, understand, and can exploit. The key is that it's always new and different forcing every player, every new game to be creative in coming up with solutions to the random problem with equally random tools to promote critical thinking skills. I'm just not sure how to gamify "the scientific method" itself or I'd be actively working on making this a reality.

Global Eden

Objective: plant the 🌎🌍 globe

Where (in simulation?) You can build nurseries, build drones to send plants to your local surroundings, link up with other druids across the Earth, collect & add reports on mycelium, bacterial & insect cohabitations, explore the woodwidewebs, develop food & energy generation, waste remediation for all buildings (every plot of land on the planet shall (should) contribute to global wealth). Restore & progress balance of life from this dismal current dystopian quest for blood oil steel and waste. Make this planet a better vacation spot than Risa in the closest 1000 galaxies. A happy Ent-friendly planet.

Understanding local Flora & fungii for food, dress, & medication (open source libraries & communities at every forest!)

I love to see more use of tech towards global wealth & unity. Good air & water, good food, good communities, great forests, good travels... These are elements of global wealth. Money and marketing have dwindling use & tax us of great creativity (another lovely element of global wealth) and energies. Building & sharing abilities are priceless.

Gratitude & celebration daily.

The two I want are already made. Goat Simulator and Great Lakes Simulator.

Probably just an improved version of EmuVR. Essentially it allows you to emulate games in a VR bedroom. It is limited to RetroArch systems but it would be really neat if I could smoothly play modern consoles or PC games with it.

Even if it was a hacked together kind of way like using a capture card and something like XLink Kai to play together with someone else.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant OP. I just like the idea of playing video games in a simulated room.

Other than that maybe a Blockbuster owner? Recommending people movies and watching segments of films on the displays mounted to the roof sounds nice.

I always wanted to try a world simulator based around mana flows. Trying to create a set of fictional rules that generated a functioning world seems fun.

Walking in a forest simulator, it'll literally bw just that, a game where you walk in a forest with extremely realistic graphics and expertly crafted ambiance and sounds, would be the perfect game for me to relax with

I'd like to create a sim so immersive that it can't be distinguished from reality. Anybody who displays authoritarian tendencies would be forced to spend the rest of their lives playing that game, where they can be a bootlicker or a dictator without hurting anybody else.

Currently started (at least somewhat) working on a submarine simulation/strategy game. I want it to be as lightweight as possible so it runs on as much as possible. Probably a lot of 2D graphics wherever necessary but a lot of focus will be on sensors and calculations. I want it to be Dieselpunkish with a technology tree between 1910s and 1960s but without featuring real world countries or submarines and no nuclear technology. The simulation of individual ships should be in depth in a dwarf fortress kind of way and I want realistic sound propagation. I’ll try to incorporate submarine design as well.

Fucking

World of World of Warcraft

Reboot Steel Battalion, the only real mech simulator.

every-setting-from-dreams-i-have explorer

Memelord Simulator