I’d kind of like more roguelite variants of older games. We’ve had some games that I’ve really enjoyed like that, like Nova Drift, based on Asteroids. They’re also often light on hardware.
Kenshi and Noita are both basically single game genres that I like. I’d like more of same (there is a Kenshi 2 underway).
I’d like to be able to buy assets on, say, Steam and let all relevant games use them. In real life, I have a couple of card decks that I really like. There’a a whole industry of small companies putting these decks out. But…I can’t use them in the games that make use of playing cards.
For example, I’d love to use a black deck that uses four colors with metallic trim in any game that uses cards. searches Something like this:
Same sort of idea with, oh, audio. Like, I’d like to be able to, say, just purchase synthwave tracks and then use user-made playlists that make use of them in any game. Right now, a musician has to go out and partner with a game company on a per-game basis or something to get that done legally, which is a meaningful barrier. But replacing a few assets (add tracks to game playlist X) can probably be done in a pretty bulletproof, simple way.
I’d kind of like to see a game with vector graphics textures. Only challenge I can think of is that the existing compressors I’ve seen for textures are really slow, and you’d probably want to render, compress, and cache a raster version of a given vector image at a given resolution.
I’d like to see more wargames that make use of sensors and fog of war. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command, Eugen’s real-time tactics games, and some of the more “hard sim” things like Command: Modern Operations are kind of heading in this direction. Wargames typically give players extraordinary, ahistorical situational awareness.
I’d like to get HD versions of some successful low-res pixel art games.
From a thematic standpoint, I’d kind of like a more “grown-up” vampire game (or books, since you mention that). I don’t mean pornographic. Most vampire stuff tends to, as best I can tell, target a teen demographic and tends to focus a lot on action. Nothing wrong with that, as such, but I was looking for something with less flash a while back and stuff like Vampire: The Masquerade-based IP is just not what I’d call the deepest from a worldbuilding standpoint.
I’d like to have some better multiple-choice gamebook-type video game titles. Choice of Games makes a line of these, but while they have some with solid writing, I simply don’t like them much as games—the game aspect tends to look like “choose a particular characteristic and consistently pick options that conform to it to win”. That’s not much fun as a game. Traditional keyboard-based interactive fiction, like the TADS/Inform stuff, is a lot more game-like. One is solving puzzles or suchlike.
So, for many things there aren’t alternatives (or active ones, at any rate). The Threadiverse userbase is presently considerably smaller than Reddit’s. Reddit has about 430 million MAU. The Threadiverse has about 50k. For every active user here, there are about nine thousand on Reddit—that limits our coverage of niche stuff.
That being said, I’d recommend looking at:
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
They spider all Threadiverse instances and build a searchable list of the communities out there.
Note that by default, they don’t show NSFW communities (you’ll need to tick the checkbox for it), which might be an issue if you’re looking for analogs of subreddits that have pictures of girls or similar.
'Course, each additional user expands the ability to cover more niches, so welcome. :-)
EDIT: You should be able to find, for example, !leagueoflegends@lemmy.world on there, but also notice that there’s very little posting outside a moderator posting the patch notes for each release.
EDIT2: You’ll get more traffic on more-general communities like !games@lemmy.world, if you’re hunting for activity, and they generally aren’t overwhelmed by traffic. But…they also won’t have the same level of focus as on communities specifically focused on individual more-niche topics.