I’d love to see a game that allows you to create a game within the game. It’s something I’ve always wanted to see and I sincerely doubt it’ll ever happen because I seem to be the only one that wants this lol.
So here’s what you’d be able to do:
Create Characters: The level of Soul Calibur’s character creation and customization tools, but taken to the next level with tons of different items and variations on items and color wheels to change everything to suite your taste.
Create Movelists: To a degree. You could select the archetype you’d want, and there would be several options per archetype as well as weapons and special moves within movelists.
Obviously the move lists have to come pre-balanced or the characters will be broken. But there could be a huge suite of special moves that do the same thing, but look different, throws that you can choose from as well as different looking projectiles that have different effects and colors (again, within the predetermined balance), as well as different types of teleport animations, different versions of the same kick / punch moves, combos, etc.
Enough variety in everything so that the player feels like they’re editing and customizing the move list to their liking without sacrificing the balance needed to make the game function properly.
Create a Select Screen: With an in-game camera, you can pose the character (like in Tekken 7), zoom in or out, take the picture that will go on the select screen, set the background behind the picture (from templates), choose a select screen backdrop, whether characters will appear on the select screen (like the old MK games, for example), the animation that occurs when a character is selected (again, from a list of predetermined animations), etc.
Create a Voice: I’m not sure if this can actually be done, but for players that have Kinect, it’d be cool if the game could actually use your speech for character names, the intro word like “Fight” or “Engage” as well as some sort of round or match victory word. Maybe you can even assign a voice word to a few moves per character as well. Probably not, but it’d be pretty cool if you could. Maybe there are even modifiers that you could use on the voice? Like to sound female if you’re a guy or demonic or whatever. Again, probably not, but it’d still be cool.
Create a Theme: Another likely impossible addition, it’d be great if players could choose from a list of thematic styles that would give players theme specific stages to fight in, and players could also choose to pull in stages from the regular game as well.
Create a Secret: Players can choose to leave certain characters off of the select screen and choose one item from a list of predetermined conditions that a player would have to meet in order to challenge a hidden character to battle. They would also have the option of choosing whether defeating the hidden character unlocks the character on the select screen or if a condition must be met on the select screen to choose the hidden character.
Create a Story: Using predetermined templates, the player could both write a character bio that shows up in game as well as a character ending for when you beat the arcade mode. Perhaps there could also be another template that appears before or after a match of the player’s choosing, such as a vendetta match or something along those lines.
Lastly, templates can be chosen for the intro and ending of the entire game. Players can choose if the text simply shows up on the screen, slowly scrolls on the screen, etc. If voice work can actually be used, then maybe the player can actually speak their intro and final game ending.
Custimize Existing Content: This would allow players to use assets from the actual game for their own game, so if they like a character in the game, they could bring them in, change their outfit, customize some of their moves, maybe change a throw animation here and there, rename them and write a new story for them, etc.
While I’d love to say that players could then share their games online, I could see a million and one problems with trying to police this type of content, so I’d be fine with either playing it locally only or maybe some mechanism that allows people to only share their games with friends or something like that. Not sure how that would work or if it’s even possible.
Also, I recognize that a lot of this stuff is unrealistic and problematic from a development standpoint. I mean, how many templates and moves and what not can you actually put in to a game to give players enough choice to where this is something people would actually be interested in, and would most people be interested in it regardless? I know I would, but that’s just me. 