Intrusive thoughts

I often have thoughts about all the shitty things I’ve done during my life. The people I trusted and then betrayed, or the times I’ve made the wrong choices and lost out. At this time in my life in particular I keep being haunted by the thoughts of all my mistakes which led me up to this point, and I find myself cursing the people who in some way helped get me into this mess. I need to remember two things. First: I can’t change the past, and while remembering it is a good guide to not repeating it, focusing on it is unhealthy. Second, I got myself into this just as much as anyone else. I can’t act like I was blameless. As the song goes, though I did not pull the trigger, I built the gun. And eh sometimes I did pull the trigger.

I’m sitting here remembering a lot of times when I made the wrong choice, thinking of how my life would be otherwise, and that’s not healthy. So whenever this happens I instead need to focus my energies into something new and productive, like honing my skills or searching for new opportunities. New opportunities basically means jobs, and I’m working on that. My skills is a harder one, science isn’t something you can practice at home. But I think coding is, and I should take up some coding projects in my free time to at least give me something to look back on as a success story.

So with that in mind here are a few synopses of games I’ve thought about in my head.

Geniuses who are able to build wonder machines out of spare parts are tasked with defeating martian invaders who only they can see. The game would feature a comprehensive “wonder” system where you can specify and build a specific device for a given purpose. A gun perhaps, or an airship, or a cloning machine that creates replicas of your dead soldiers. But every wonder comes with a price, they all have a base fault which can never be removed. The gun may be possessed by a committed pacifist, and its spirit must be placated before it allows itself to be fired. The airship may have an inscrutable control scheme that seems to change every time you fly it,
necessitating that pilots sit and re-familiarize themselves with it before or during each flight. The cloning machine may work on “life for a life” principles, meaning any gain of life must be paid for upfront and in full.

A turn based strategy FPS. America does a bit of nation building in Mexico after our policies and others lead to a civil war their which threatens America’s interests. The new model army is not one of vast bomber formations or miles of tanks, it is one of small strike forces of a handful of troops, using every weapon at their disposal to isolate and eliminate threats with surgical precision. To this end, an experimental unit of marines is given brain implants which allow them to communicate instantaneously with each other across the battlefield and to strategize their moves. Part of this is the BullShit system (I need a name for it) where the player can pause the game and see the locations of all of their and the enemy soldiers within range on the battlefield. The player can then give orders to each of their units in turn which will be executed together once the pause is ended, essentially allowing them to plan a coordinated series of moves from their own and other characters in order to act as a team to take down threats. Several units can provide covering fire as two outflank from either side. One unit can juggle an enemy into the air while another takes to the skies, attaches a grenade to his chest, and throws him down at a separate enemy position. As part of this planning, the player would see what the predicted movements of the enemies would do in response to the early movement that the player queues up. Early game enemies have slow reaction times and can basically be seen to do little in response to the player’s planned movements, making them easy prey to be eliminated according to the player’s plans. Later enemies will in kayfabe have the same skills the player has and be able to react reflexively to whatever strategy the player plans. The player will have to account for an enemy’s reactions, and in some way create a strategy that they can’t escape from like coming at them from multiple angles. The overall gameplay outside of turn based mode should be hectic and action-y, but with a pace that is too fast for twitch reflexes, and will thus encourage the player to use their abilities to plan movements against the enemies in turn based mode.