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• For card games using a standard deck, using four different colors for suits. It improves readability. Balatro kind of does this with orange diamonds, but the clubs and spades are pretty similar.

• Better touchscreen-capable text-based interactive fiction. I’m not sure exactly what I want here, but I can list some items. Text-based interactive fiction has kind of stagnated; there was a wave starting in the late 1970s/early 1980s or so with limited human-ish language parsers, stuff like Zork. AI-based generation sounded neat, but the reality is…kind of meh, since generating text that reads kind of like human-written text doesn’t really make for a human-written game. Though the ability to illustrate games in real-time based on conditions with latent-diffusion models is kind of cool, and that seems to be viable. I thought that touchscreens would herald in a new era where multiple-choice would work well, since touchscreens don’t permit for typing, but phones and tablets with limited battery power should work well with text-based interactive fiction, but what we’ve gotten has IMHO been…underwhelming. Choice of Games has a lot of multiple-choice interactive fiction games, but most of them basically play out where one seeks to conform to one particular archetype and one’s success in the game is judged by how closely one does that. That…isn’t all that much fun, to my way of thinking, though the writing is often decent. In 2024, I think that having support for speech synth of the text should be an option, though I personally wouldn’t use it.

• Low-res pixel art games having full 24-bit palettes. I think that low-res pixel art games are a great way to reduce development costs. But I don’t play them because I want a retro experience where NES-style (or God forbid, even earlier) palettes are used. My monitor can display 24-bit color, and it doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to permit for that.

• Low-res pixel art games avoiding chiptune music. Similar to the above. I think that low-res pixel art games are a great way to reduce development costs. I like them for that reason. However, music that sounds like it was done on a limited-capability frequency-based synthesizer of the sort that a lot of early computers and video game consoles doesn’t do that. Some people like it for nostalgia reasons. I don’t; I think that it just sounds awful.

• Exploration of other ways to make the brain “fill in” for limited graphic arts work. Low-res pixel art is a good way to do this. Basically, if you make art that isn’t too high-fidelity, a players brain does a good job of “filling in” the missing detail. But I’m confident that it’s not the only way to do it, that there are other routes, forms of distortion and obscuring the image, that will have similar effects. Low-res pixel art has been very heavily used. I’d like to see other things…I don’t know, maybe having stuff in the foreground obscuring some of a character, or something like that.

• Use of dynamic, dramatic lighting in 2d games. Stuff like Starbound but more-so.

• Good, physics-following fabric in games. We’ve been banging on this for years. I still don’t feel that we’re there. I don’t think that we’re anywhere near the theoretical limits of what the hardware can do. I’d like there to be a fabric engine that can handle collisions and fluid forces, like wind and such, being wet, being pulled, etc. It’s not really critical to any game, but I’ve seen so many damn research papers come out about it over the years and the reality in 2024 is still underwhelming to me.

• Similarly, I still don’t feel that volumetric fog is where it could be (at least in the games I’ve played).

• Similarly, for trees blowing in the wind. Almost every game outdoors needs to deal with this. Here, I’m talking about procedurally-generating leaf rustle noises and making realistic tree movement. This seems like the kind of thing that should be done once and used in many games: it’s not a core feature of any game, but many games would like this to be done. I haven’t been blown away by what I’ve seen.

• Real-world terrain and foliage generation. I’m not familiar with the state-of-the-art here; the last time I was playing with procedural terrain generators, they could do wind and water erosion and such, let one paint a heightmap. But we aren’t, that I’ve seen, at the point that I can just say “generate real-world environments” and have something that looks all that much like a natural environment on Earth spanning different biomes come out. A lot of games would like to take advantage of such functionality. We’ve had lots of stabs at it taken. I’d rather that map-making for Earth-based games be able to start with at least an auto-generated environment that looks outright photorealistic, and then letting the mapmaker tune it for their game. Hand-building natural environments is human-labor intensive and something that lots of games have to do. Bonus for providing levers to adjust the terrain procedurally.

• Flight-sims having support for analog flightsticks. I don’t know if this is actually a good business decision. Gamepads with analog thumbsticks are “good enough” that most flightsims can make do, and so people are less-willing to get analog flightsticks than PC gamers were in the 1990s or so. But for any dogfighting games, absent a lot of assistive stuff, it’s kinda nice to have the kind of accuracy that a flightstick provides. I’m willing to tolerate not having some kinds of real-world stuff that tend to come with flightstick use, like having to worry about trim, but being able to use a dedicated flightstick is nice. If I were really going to get greedy, it’d be nice to have support for force-feedback sticks in games that simulate pre-fly-by-wire aircraft, but I don’t think that there’s enough demand to even support that hardware market any more, and despite the neat things that VR can do for flight sims, it doesn’t do force-feedback. Note that I’m not talking about rumble motors, which are sometimes what someone means when they talk about force feedback, but actual resistance to moving a stick based on the real-world resistance a stick would have had.

• Ability to delete many saved games at a go.

• Ability to retain an arbitrary number of saved games, and frequent checkpointing. If it doesn’t ruin the game to let me roll back, I’d like to have the option to do so. I don’t really want to deal with manually whacking “quicksave” all the time, and space for save games isn’t generally an issue.