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.
I never expected to find the idea of a game based on finding utilities underground to be exciting but you did it. I’m in.
If only I had the time to learn game programming. And art, and music, and…basically everything.
I could be rich!
Lmao this is hilarious. You could also throw in kids from the neighborhood stealing the little red flags 🚩 that are left in the ground for marking digs
A few things to remember to add:
- False positives
- Abandoned utilities
- Utility maps and GPS coords that were never made, were never updated, or are flat out wrong
- Contractors who will make every excuse and lie about what happened
- Random people asking if your digging for gold and worried if you’re going to tear up their lawn
Yeah, reading about these things are what made me realize how layered the game could be.
You could have a lying contractor who kicked dirt over your marks, and whether you would get the blame or not would depend on screenshots you took of your work beforehand XD
From a technical perspective, I bet programming abandoned utilities and how those impact detection would be a challenge for the programmers interested in the “simulation” part. I bet there’s some math going on there!
This is a genuinely great idea. I’ve been playing Dave the Diver and I can see this having a similar level of management, slowly introducing you to the new roles - first you’re just marking, and over time you’re managing more and more of the whole process and earning money on the way.
Heaps of room for cool visuals like revealing the pipes you find, cutscenes showing work done/completed.
Love it! 100% would play this.
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.
Driving simulator where I can choose a real world location, similar to ms flight sim, where I can drive around in a 3D world
The closest thing to that would probably be euro truck simulator 2
City Car Driving exists, but I don’t know how extensive it is. You can also install mods on ETS2 to drive around in normal cars.
I tried that on my steam deck, controller support is non existent from when I last played
Id say closest game right now is assetto Corsa with mods
Ets2 has trucks, even if you mod a car in it still feels and drives like a truck
I want to rip it around my home town in a fast car, swerving through traffic lool
I would love this, put on an audiobook, get stoned, and drive around the alps or Southeast Asia. No traffic and no danger
Beam.ng has some pretty good maps where you can just drive around. They aren’t quite fleshed out as much but there’s a ton of mods too so you might be able to find one that’s just a Sunday driver.
I’d say assetto Corsa is better right now, beamng feels like a crash simulator or even just a scene creator rather than a proper driving sim
In asetto Corsa I can get real world cars in real world maps and drive it around
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.
As a non realistic version, have you played timber born? It’s about beavers making dams and towns, but very much not realistic.
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.
Actually, I was recently thinking of gravel pit simulator. It’s be like a farming sim, you’d buy various equipment and use them to move dirt separating gravel and selling it to get money to buy better requirements.
That’s be great. It would be especially cool if you could simulate gravel, with all its friction and inertia and everything. And then somehow make that same model handle everything down to the molecular sheets of clay.
I bet that model would be mind expanding to build
Not quite the same, but Snowrunner does detailed mud simulation well… and you get to drive various vehicles through it
I’ve played it a bit. The winch cables are a lot of fun
The game ‘Captain of Industry’ isn’t a simulator, but it did come to mind when reading this comment. Kinda like cities skylines but with a heavy focus on excavation. There’s one map where I spent hours excavating a path up a mountainside to escape the starting area.
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.
On a similar note, middle management simulator
It better have a middle management manager sitting at their desk playing the middle management simulator.
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.
Star trek sim. Like bridgecrew but better. Larger crews including a medical and engineering and security.
Faster than light is close, but not really a sim perse
There are a few indie games like this. Artemis is the first to come to mind but it’s old, primitive, and clunky to play. Empty Epsilon is a free open-source spiritual successor that’s supposed to be better, but I haven’t played it.
Stationeers is vaguely that sort of thing, but more focused on maintaining a space station than exploring.
This isn’t so much a sim thing, but I would love to have a spaceship game that was like Sea of Thieves.
Honestly, Deep Rock Galactic could be that if it had more of a world to explore
Happiness.
Would be nice to experience it once in my life, even if its in simulator form.
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.
Like Game Dev Tycoon or building a redstone computer in Minecraft that itself plays Minecraft type of deal?
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.
Senuas sacrifice is that specifically about schizophrenia I believe
Maybe it exists already but I’d love a good hiking simulator for a console where when you take stunning snapshots you could send them to your phone and use as backgrounds.
Pet-sim, for VR.
Virtual Virtual Skeeball simulator.
