sierralee
patreon
Future Projects: Dreams for the Future
🕑 Added 2025-05-18 17:00:23 +0000 UTCIn this post, I want to talk about further future projects, ones that I cannot realistically take on in the near future, but would like to at some point. You could argue this is all hype and no substance, but I wanted to give a glimpse of the creativity and passion that are bubbling up inside me, so I hope it will be taken in that sense. Here are seven games I would absolutely love to create eventually.
Ouroboros Remake
Ouroboros was my first side project and I still love it. Unfortunately, it's the most visually dated of my games, including various artifacts of being developed in just two months. I think a remake with a larger budget would have a chance to reach a much larger audience, and it would be one of my first thoughts if I was ever in a position where I needed to test out new technology or collaborators.
Omnipocalypse Loop
While we're on that note, I've long nurtured an idea for a sort of spiritual successor to Ouroboros. The basic premise is that your player character is caught in a time loop as an apocalyptic scenario begins, so you repeat the cycle trying to keep you and the people you care about alive against threats that are impossibly strong at first.
As in Ouroboros, I've put a ton of thought into how a core premise that involves repetition can be kept interesting, with a combination of speeding through sections and alternate paths. Having the game be a loop gives fascinating opportunities for choice in narrative, but it will also go far beyond what you might be thinking in terms of plot and consequences. Also have a simple but fun idea for a combat system where strategy and synergy make the most difference, so you aren't grinding each cycle.
John Woo the RPG
This one is a bit crazier, but if I was ever collaborating with a team that wanted a more actiony game, this is an old idea that I think would be fun while being less expensive than a full action RPG. Basically, the idea is that you control a single character in quick gun-based fights. Combat would be turn-based, vaguely XCOM-like in terms of dealing in cover and percentages, but as your character levels you vastly increase your movement options: different flips, wall-running, use of environment, etc. Then at the end of combat, you'd have the option to rewatch it all in "real time", creating your own little action scene. ^-^ While that is probably even trickier than I imagine (and I imagine it being tricky), I think it would be something I haven't seen done before.
Magical Industrial Revolution
I would love to lean into my economic interests for a project, so this idea involves the player being a minor noble in a kingdom that is undergoing rapid magical modernization. The story would span decades, allowing me to play with both realistic investment returns and long term consequences. But because the focus is on fewer characters and regions, the budget wouldn't balloon as much, relying heavily on my writing and design. If I ever needed a project that kept the budget low for higher production value options, I would go for this first.
I know a ton of my ideas are either experimental or so involved they'd turn off a lot of players, but I can do mainstream ideas too, I promise. T-T If I ever have reason to try a more marketable game, I have some ideas I think could be a lot of fun...
American Persona
If the Persona brand is big enough, I think this is simple and high concept: it's a Persona-like set in the USA. Life sim stuff is not my usual cup of tea, but I really enjoy the interaction of systems and I have a bunch of ideas for iterating on those, not just replicating. I was contemplating a superhero theme, because that's very American and hasn't been done by the series, plus we could draw inspiration from things like Spiderverse and have some stylishness without being a P5-knockoff.
Four Heroes
More complex than it sounds, this is my idea for hitting the notes of "nostalgic traditional RPG" while still being interesting. The basic premise is that we start out with an apparently typical adventuring party of four heroes, but they each either reveal secrets or go through changes that radically transform how the story feels. This moves through cynicism but, critically, turns back to optimism and friendship on the other side. I guess this sounds simple in brief, but I've polished some ideas for this quite a bit.
Doing a Chrono Trigger
I'm not too cynical here: hitting notes of nostalgia is so much of a common technique for indie devs that some publishers consider it a requirement for serious investment. I have a developed concept that could be marketed like this while actually doing something new. Instead of different time eras, it would be about differently-themed worlds, trying to capture the fun of Chrono Trigger without being a clone. For example, magic works in one world and doesn't in others, but the same is true for technology and the effects of brute force. Tons of fun ideas in my head for how the fundamentally different laws of the different worlds would interact, leading up to crazy crossover stuff!
These entries are just hinting at all the ideas in my head for these projects; they could each have gotten a post as long as the others. Of course, in the end, ideas are cheap to worthless. T-T It seems very likely that I will never have the industry connections to get publisher-level funding, so my only path is to keep trying to make each project a little better than the last, slowly ascending through the stories available to me. Thank you all for supporting my career this far!
Comments
Dark Art
Your idea of "Magical Industrial Revolution " could be super fun and very appealing to those who know and love "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura". If you strategically place some homage to that quite revolutionary (for its time) title, I think you'll be able to market it with relative ease and, given you being your very fertile writer and creative self, capitalize on Aracnum's style quite effectively.
Sierra Lee
I hadn't played that one, so thanks for mentioning it to me!
Johnny Bragas
Had to catch-up a bit, so I'm a bit late to the party. Your ideas sound great. I'd buy into them. π Regarding your John Woo idea. If I understood it correctly, John Wick: Hex had such a live replay feature. You're playing tactically with pauses, and at the end of the level you can replay all your actions in realtime.
AchtungNight
These ideas sound great but I hope you will finish TLS soon- I want to see it get a proper ending. Soon.
Shadowjack
The John Woo-alike is an idea I've wanted to see someone do for a long while -- I thought of both gun opera/cyberpunk or wild west settings -- though I admit it would be difficult to handle all the animations, action interactions, etc. That there's a Chrono Trigger-alike idea amuses me, because I've described The Last Sovereign to others as reminding me of Chrono Trigger, for how you swiftly get into the story and make each fight feel meaningful, without wasting a lot of time on grind or prologue. So I think you at least have the understanding of pacing! The Industrial Revolution idea feels like it plays to your strengths well. I can well imagine the little kingdom's buildings changing from time period to time period, with a few recognizable landmarks remaining...
Sierra Lee
How to market the classic one is something I'm not sure about at all. =/ I think the idea could easily be marketable, but I don't know how much to reveal. You could be right about games banking on nostalgia causing some burnout. We'll see how Threads of Time, which is pushing that angle particularly hard, is received whenever it's released. On the other hand, an RPG Maker project actually calling itself "Seed of Nostalgia" just made a lot of money on KS: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primitivepixels/seed-of-nostalgia
Desertopa
All of these sound really worthwhile to me. I might be a bit biased towards the "four heroes" concept, since lately I've been kind of stuck on the idea of games that follow something like the classic JRPG formula, but which have actually grown up with the sort of audience who grew up with them. But unless it really advertises the degree to which it's doing something different than the average indie JRPG, it might not be as marketable as it deserves to be. I absolutely think you could make something that lives up to the spirit of the original Chrono Trigger, but I think a significant contingent of indie RPG audiences might also be burned out on seeing developers try to imitate classic games like Chrono Trigger and fall flat, so it might be a niche with a low availability of trust. I think the magical industrial revolution concept has a high face value "doing something different" vibe, which might be valuable in this field.
