The dream game that i want to create, but can't due to lack of resources/time/money/skills is...

For anyone who hasn't realised yet: http://yourgameideaistoobig.com

Not counting the "an MMO based on real life whete you can do anything" "idea"...
Mine would be a faction based MMOFPS witg permadeath and RPG-character growth elements in a massive persistant world, overlaid with an MMORTS where player corporations fight for control over regions, where battles in the RTS mode generate "maps" for the FPS mode to fight on, overlaid with an MMO-city-builder where playets develop economies inside the currently-not-warring areas to generate funds the RTS mode. It then comes full circle as the FPS players fight in and damage the city-buider's work. With an optional web-client for building/RTSing casually as well as a desktop/console version...
Now if only I had several hundred million dollars to throw away...

For anyone who hasn't realised yet: http://yourgameideaistoobig.com

Woah, demoralising. Not because my game is too big, but because i put my current specification into it and it told me i should be done in 3 weeks. I've been at it for months. Bummer. lol.

Ha, good idea, this thread could be fun! Mine wasn't, and still isn't, anywhere near as far-fetched as some answers will be:

I wanted to make a game similar to Millennium 2.2 or Deuteros. These were sort of four-X space sim type games, dating from the 16-bit era. They had strong storytelling but no missions, or at least the illusion of no missions. There wasn't a campaign mode or anything, you just played until some event occurred, which advanced the story and expanded the gameplay with new technologies and new goals to go with it. The events were triggered by your actions, but there was rarely an obvious link, making the storytelling suspenseful and well-paced despite being pretty much completely linear. The gameplay was quite slow, and user interaction rarely extended beyond clicking icons on static screens, but if anything that added to the experience.

A goal like colonising your first planet was a long-term activity that involved many smaller steps - research a long-range probe, build it, send it to the target planet, find out the planet isn't worth colonising, repeat, meanwhile build up a mining fleet and mine asteroids to gather rare resources needed to build colony sections, of which you need eight, plus the ships to transport them. Oh, and halfway through this get contacted by some untrustworthy aliens that aren't openly hostile but you'd better start researching some defence lasers... etc. It sounds like a chore, but you lose yourself in the detail. For a little kid like I was, with posters of rockets and planets on the bedroom walls, these were intensely satisfying and gripping games.

So yeah, I'd still like to recapture that feeling: the mystery of space and the danger and sheer effort required to explore it. But I don't have the time to do it justice.

In 1999 Homeworld was released.
In 2000 Ground Control was released.

Some time in 2000 I had the idea for a game which was a persistent Galaxy with Homeworld-like fleet battles to control the skies above planets combined with Ground Control style ground combat to control said planet to gain its resources for your empire.

Fortunately I realised pretty quickly that this game was clearly insane and never started on it ;)

A remake of xcom apocalypse with all the missing features added, and more depth to the cityscape, scaled up for much larger combat.

Since about 1996 I have been wanting to create: (( I have some parts of this concept working - believe it or not ))

Open world 2D MMO that has endlessly procedurally generated land and biomes.

Each biome has resources that regenerate over time.

Players start off not knowing anything, and have to build up their "knowledge trees" over time. Each branch leads to different areas, discoveries and skills.

All skills have to be discovered and learned independently - assuming the player has high enough knowledge in the correct branches.

Everyone starts off with stone--age tech, and can move up to space-age with enough time, knowledge, and discoveries.

Players are what builds the game's story lines, and " societies" . Alliances, factions, guilds, kingdoms, or any kind of government the players can think up.

Players are responsible for creating everything that is on the map - towns, cities, nations e.t.c. (( with enough tech knowledge, they can create helper robots ))

TL:DR

I want to create a 2D version of an old school MUD were players are what created the world and ran the narratives it has.

Minus the obligatory MMO or lolomgsuperhugeworldwhereyoucandoanything thing:

A "delegation-based" RTS where you can assign squads or regions to players on your team to move or build up. Think of it like StarCraft with distributed micro. Better players could fight against worse players simply by providing a team-size handicap. Sort of a more structured version of the "multiple people as one faction" approaches in some strategy games. It's got the added benefit of allowing crazy things like WarCraft 3-style "RPG" units at Supreme Commander scales (because you can delegate squads to not get crushed by all the micro).

I'm pretty sure it's technically feasible (though I've never made a RTS and don't know the CPU requirements for such a beast) but RTSs aren't really one-man projects.

No Man's Sky.

It's not precisely the game I dreamed of building, but it's so damn close I can almost taste it... All those years of Sean O'Neil, Ysaneya, myself, and many others building procedural planet after procedural planet, and none of us had the vision and drive to actually build that.

On the one hand, I'm sad I wasn't involved in building it. On the other, I'm overjoyed that somebody went and built it anyway

My ideas have actually gotten bigger over time rather than smaller. Among other reasons for this, when I first tried to design a game I hadn't played any MMOs yet. But anyway, my first game idea was a sidescrolling arcade combat RPG, pretty much a cross between Golden Axe and E.V.O. - The Search For Eden, though with more story. Actually I'm not 100% sure whether that idea came before or after the idea for the Myst-style adventure game plus dating sim elements, they were around the same time...

No Man's Sky.

It's not precisely the game I dreamed of building, but it's so damn close I can almost taste it... All those years of Sean O'Neil, Ysaneya, myself, and many others building procedural planet after procedural planet, and none of us had the vision and drive to actually build that.

On the one hand, I'm sad I wasn't involved in building it. On the other, I'm overjoyed that somebody went and built it anyway

You should check out shores of hazeron. It's got every feature no man's sky does (Plus way... Way more), but it's made by a programmer who can't do art at all. All assets are procedurally generated, except the player characters (Which you create).

Still working on it, so I won't say (especially due to my popularity level here).

I was semi-ready to release a demo when I joined the site. Now I am actually further behind than when I started though due to poor choice of (now defunct) engines and some other big 'real life' issues.

My game is OK in scope. As for art, I learned to do it myself. I may not be 'pro' but it is better than I ever expected to do and does not take me all that long to make stuff. I don't have any firm release date and don't care as much about getting it out by a certain time, but it will definitely get released eventually.

As for your art...I doubt your art problems could not be addressed. Of course to get it to AAA ZOMG X-TREME levels you will need a budget of many millions, but I'm sure you could get something going once you learned more. And indeed before you learn in depth how the art pipeline works it is kind of futile to try and make a game, especially solo.

Now I am actually further behind than when I started though due to poor choice of (now defunct) engines

Welcome to the club! I started again from scratch after backing the losing horse that was xna and xbox live indie games for xbox 360.

I now target directx 11, a bit more future proof.

For anyone who hasn't realised yet: http://yourgameideaistoobig.com

$1800 ¯\(º_o)/¯

I'm not ambitious enough...

You should check out shores of hazeron. It's got every feature no man's sky does (Plus way... Way more), but it's made by a programmer who can't do art at all

It's not... "pretty". I don't have a better qualifier for my feelings than that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for some people aesthetics are one of the most important elements of a game. I happen to be one of those people.

Back in the late 90's I had an idea for a JRPG style game (to be set on a scale map of a terraformed Venus) that I was going to do myself and it probably would've collapsed at some point under what whatever complexity I had in mind for it if it weren't for that I lost (misplaced, deleted, or formatted over) all the code fairly early on.

For several months while unemployed in the early 2000's I had every intention of seeing through a project that was supposed to allow players to play any card game they wanted as if they sat down with their buddies at a kitchen table with a deck of cards. That collapsed when I was faced with connecting players. I can't quite seem to get up the enthusiasm to look into whatever modern day solutions might be available.

My current project will probably never amount to a game for public release as I find myself going off on various tangents and I decided to just stop caring about what direction I go and instead to just enjoy programming what I feel like.

I ran my game idea through the web site ...

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Estimate: $1,434,102

You could hire a team to make it for that price.
Or you could make it yourself in about 29.0 years

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I have to disagree on the time frame and cost.

I had a pre-alpha version of the biomes management, resources management, player skill trees, weapons and tools implementation, inventory management, skill based crafting trees, and a few other items in less than 2 weeks without using any kind of game engine or libraries.

If I ever bothered to pick up and work on my code base again, the only major issues would be networking, system optimization and 2D art.

Edit: "Procedural generation for endless replayability!" adds about $800,000 to the cost

Edit: "Procedural generation for endless replayability!" adds about $800,000 to the cost

I think that's one of those things that doesn't always benefit from economies of scale.

Turns out procedural generation is very expensive for publisher-driven projects where you have to meet the specifications of the project, and indies can get away with shipping procedural stuff that is merely interesting, or that they happened on accidentally.

I have to disagree on the time frame and cost.

It is a joke website... designed to give out decent advice to beginners after you get your lols.

I have a bit of an alternative viewpoint, based on nothing solid whatsoever. Henry Ford said it best: "If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.". My view is that sometimes people manage to create things only because they didn't realise that it was impossible. Of course many more people fail for exactly that reason, but it can be very educational to test your limits. The more vision you have, coupled with solid work ethic and enough free time to put the effort in, and the more of an idea you have as to how to approach each different aspect of what you're trying to do, the more of a wildcard you probably become. I think though if you're posting in the beginner's forum and asking for advice about where to even start, you don't fit into the wildcard category.