A few game ideas

While i'm just a programmer with no team i wouldn't mind if anyone wants to take these ideas and bring them to life. And whatever, if you do poor job then the idea is still free for taking later on for me or anyone else They are not complete ideas or they might take more effort than any indie developer would be willing to attempt.

1) Visual novels or RPG of (Chinese origin) cultivation worlds. These stories have fanmade english translations and drawn versions (manhua). They are very interesting to read but if you do, please stick with the written text because drawn versions have a very high tendency to butcher the details that make up the whole idea you need for a game. Both these novels have in common that you start as weak person but then end up something like ruler of the universe, travelling across the worlds. One might surely need permission from the original Chinese authors and the english translators, unless you get a translator of your own and do better from original material but it could be slower.

- Rebirth of the Urban Immortal Cultivator (story is actually not finished but it's long still)
Several unique themes like rebirth while keeping memories, body customization, qi gathering from environment, world as big as many universes, powers beyond imagination, space travel with body alone. The novel goes into great detail to tie in cultivation world with current 2020 Earth and countries within, it is quite interesting reading how main character is seen in social media...
- Peerless Martial God (is finished)
This also has body customization and qi gathering but they are done in a different way. This story makes person go near the element source for example near water to feed in "water qi" for example and then be able to use that element in abilities. He creates his own moves or learns them from books. Many different elements and combinations of primal elements. Other big thing here is worlds within worlds within worlds... These are sort of magical hidden worlds which can also be broken with enough force.
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While it would be probably easier to just make visual novels out of them with special effects and whatnot, i see great potential in RPG games too. Now you ask "but can't you just do that with experience bar?" - No. Sigh, both of those novels actually do have set rate of progression and levels based on how much power a body can hold (player would get stronger with every single point of experience), but it is said that there are major differences to how a person ends up based on method he uses to refine his body.

For simplicity lets call it go from level 1 to 100. Person A follows "standard" practises, trains and levels from 1 to level 2. Person B used to be level 100 but died and rebirthed into level 1, now knowing what good practises are. He trains using a different method to level 2 and at the moment of levelup his actual strength is same as level 3 going by standard practises, and while having highly advanced techniques to match even tougher opponents.

So rebirth mechanics can be used to make dying "fun". In a sandbox RPG your past characters may have given birth to families or built towns, in short, made history. Now now, while i mention families i don't mean the game should have sex. Maybe some handholding and combining your inner forces to new "soul spirit" orb that pops into a baby or whatever xD I think there can be some very simplistic non-deeplearning AI to have villagers and basic emotions or something. Slightly more indepth than Skyrim in dialogs but totally different sort of implementation. What should result is friends and foes, rival clans, towns and worlds.

How do i imagine the body refining then? That's actually a big questionmark. I've thought about it for many ways but can't come up with a final one. The worst case that i don't want is to just look at player crosslegged on grass, then waiting afk or speedup time. A button could for example set player in deep concentration mode where he detects different floating essences. Initially they could be either some completely invisible or blurred while you don't know what they mean. You could just try to absorb them in you and hope for the best, and this is where the rebirth could come in that you would already know them all from beginning. How to absorb and where to absord... At the center you might have your body, but you need to also decide the method of essence absorbtion and this is player made choice. At the beginning you might not even understand what this means so the choices you can make are also a bit blurred, the way the essences tie into your molecular structure. There might be pros and cons of each way, the easy way is probably fast to level up and learn a certain elemental abilities, but it might be capped in max level or general level of strength remain low. Things like this are not easy to design, if you come up with something good i salute you.

About time, yes you might also let player remain still for 1 whole year in timeskip mode using essences as nutrient for survival. Letting towns evolve meanwhile. Friends and foes grow or perish, they might even come and interrupt your meditation midway. But time may also be a part of combat. Each individual would have a reaction speed, so if you are much faster than others then you might see them moving in slow motion while you move normal. Or you might just see a flash and collapse to ground, not even seeing what hit you... don't take on enemies much stronger than you...

Speaking of enemies, in a game it might be best that everyone sees exactly each others power level and speed or whichever way those stats are defined. Both the novels go to hilarious lengths in the hiding, to the way enemies always underestimate the main character. Isn't that what every mmorpg enemies always do anyway. We don't need that. Make attempts at intelligence and match fights with relatively similar power, of course each may have hidden trump cards.

Again if you do want to take the visual novel path, please keep the details from novel too. The manhuas went from 1 fight to another without even really explaining who fights who, why are we fighting or at what cost. These novels are still i think pretty new, late 2010 type so i don't think world in general knows much about these ideas, they could even be received as big hitgames. Any mmoprg ever does is make character levelling too simplified and it's their downfall. Also i didn't even get to details on what it means to create new abilities based on what elements you learned...

 

Those are not unique. There are ton of chinese works of this kind, and they are ripping each other off, copying elements.

Spoiler

"Tales of Demons and Gods", "I was Trash", "Return from the immortal world", "Return of Urban Mad Immortal", and so on.

Another problem is that RUIC devolves into complete insanity later.

Also, steam already has "Amazing Cultivator Simulator". I also believe there's "Tales of Wuxia" which may be similar, and then there's "Fate Seeker" and wasn't there some recently released chinese game?
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Anyway. While there is a potential of those ideas system being useful in a game, impelmenting them properly would require a studio, as it is at least pillars of eternity level of work. The material would be of dubious interest to the average player (as the whole cultivator thing is comletely alien to most people), and studios have other plans of their own.

 

Yeah I have no idea what a "cultivator" is in this context.

The only Chinese game I have on Steam is The Gate of Firmament, I have no idea if it's using that theme or not.

 

It is Daosism/Buddhism based idea of someone who cultivates their inner power, and eventually surpasses humanity, reaching immortal stage and then godhood. They also often move into "immortal world" which is some fantasy land with overpowered characters. Cultivating is often depicted as them sitting in lotus pose with flames/glow about. It is also often closely tied to traditional chinese medicine (meridians, pills refining, etc). There are terms for that too. "Wuxia" - Martial Arts realm, and I believe, XiaXia - immortal realm.

Unfortunately. In ALL manhua(chinese manga - manhua) works I found this devolves into "superpower pew pew" or "cultivator" protagonist becoming incredibly arrogant and killing anyone who looks wrong at him. The "Urban Cultivator" is most notorious for this, as the main character often murders entire bloodline of his opponents (as in, every living relative), and his bodycount is probably at least millions.

There's potential, but chances of it turning into a game is pretty much nil. You'd need someone with PhD in chinese culture and at the same time this person should be able to filter out unwanted foreign cultural elements from those works, for example, many manhuas make VERY big deal about social status and being/not being rich, and that can be quite unpleasant to people from different culture.

Chances of this being properly adapted, as I said, is pretty much nil. It would be comparable to someone making a mainstream rpg based on slavic fairy tales or, I don't know, on Ramayana and Mahabharata.

 

Right, there are many Chinese cultivation based stories existing but it's hard to narrow them down to include what i look from them. A story where character at the end is still merely a human is non-interesting to me and if he is only tied to 1 planet or 1 solar system it's even more a no-go.

I did also think about the difficulty for indie developer before and what i could suggest is using some creatures or aliens as the race. They don't really even have to have interactions with eachother, other than fighting if it makes it easier. Every "critter" for himself. In a fictional story you don't need to have deep morals. If ant gets in the way, ant gets stomped. It's as simple as. And it doesn't even have to be a story, i'm mainly thinking of a sandbox universe with this even if singleplayer game. Urban I. Cultivator explains from beginning how strongest (even non-humanoid) beings absorb power from whole galaxies to feed their own growth. That's why that story has multiple universes and single person is just an ant. That is partly how main character sees people on Earth.

 

The issue here is that the whole cultivation thing is not mechanically interesting.

Because cultivation amounts to sitting in lotus pose and cultivating till next breakthrough with another nonsensical realm/stage name.

Except.... this is pretty much equivalent to every RPG in existence that has levels and abilities that unlock with those levels.

So to make it fun, you'd need lore, and insane amount of lore to boot. This will create illusion of foreign setting and could be fun, but that's not Indie level task. You'd end with chinese-themed RPG. Which reminds me, BioWare created Jade Empire before. That one was shaolin-themed though. And not cultivation themed.

Thinking about it a bit more, a cultivation-based title could be turned into something similar to Persona 2 or Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. That could work. But that's not a small project.

If you haven't played Nocturne before, you should probably give it a try.

 

That is why i proposed having the essence absorption player controlled. You could get a screenful of bubbles or something interesting to deal with, to simulate what goes in cultivator's head at that time. He is not sleeping unconsiously as far as i understand.

https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/pictures/130000/velka/bubbles-1437234699WWJ.jpg

Or to make it more western, don't sit but stand or something.

Bubbles, threads, weighted connections... use imagination. Not blocks though, it's not about being a puzzle but kind of conducting chemical reactions or however you want to put it.

 

In a perfect game there would be a choice between tech and cultivation, or they could be merged. Someone could "leave cultivation to the hippies" and go for rocket launchers and spaceships instead. He could probably finish the game that way too, but still lose to some really strong cultivator.