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I wouldn't, if you want the game to do well.
And I'd rather not constrain you to do so, because I don't want to negatively-impact your game.
But I think that the discussion is an interesting one to have.
Let's see. What are some of the things that I've missed or wanted?
Stale Genres
There are some genres that were once bigger, haven't had a lot going on for a while. I kind of miss these.
Game types with few examples
Early Close Combat-style games. I liked the early Close Combat games. These are top-view, real-time-tactics games. They weren't very well-balanced, but they let one build up a force to run around fighting stuff with. They did not have a strategic map -- I never really enjoyed the strategic side of refighting the things, kind of missed not having to think about the strategic layer, but still liked the ability to build up a force over time, kind of Homeworld-style. There are some vaguely-similar games, but nothing all that close.
Air combat flight sims with a dynamic campaign engine where one can affect the flow of the game. Creating good game AI is hard. Creating even tactical AI has been difficult. Creating an AI capable of doing an operational-level dynamic campaign has been extremely rare. Most games that do it have had it modded in and are in very elderly games; IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 had a dynamic campaign, though not one where a pilot could realistically do much to affect the outcome. I understand that Falcon 4.0 BMS has had it modded in. These are pretty elderly games.
Terraria/Starfield. I liked these. I'd like to see more similar games. I'd like to see more automation support, ways to create bases that could be doing things (or pretending to do things, have some effect over time) when you're away. There's the Factorio factory-building genre, but that's not really the same thing; it's entirely-focused on automation.
Kenshi. I can't find any similar games. You control a squad, starting with one character. It can grow. You can build outposts and put some characters to work on automated tasks at them. The world dynamically evolves; factions can take control of different towns and such and the world changes as a result of this. There's a sequel in the works, but it's pretty unique. Mount & Blade: Warband has some similarities -- band of characters, dynamically-evolving world, but isn't really the same type of game at all. Has "battlefields" separate from the strategic world, whereas Kenshi has one continuous map, has whole armies, doesn't permit creation of new outposts, doesn't really model what's going on at an outpost, only permits a static set of improvements to an outpost, etc.
A Command: Modern Operations-like game that works on Linux. This is more-or-less a one-of-a-kind game, more of an operational-level hard realism military sim that can handle most modern military hardware. Unfortunately, it's also unusual in that it's one of the few games on Steam that doesn't work on Linux. No real alternatives. I'd like it even more if it supported a dynamic campaign rather than fixed, scripted campaigns, though that might be getting greedy.
Wargame: Red Dragon-like game with good single-player support. I don't know quite how to describe this. It's a bit like a MOBA, but plays more like a real-time-tactical game, with more-accurate modeling of real-world units realism. I am totally uninterested in playing it multiplayer, which is unfortunate, because Eugen saw it as an almost-purely-multiplayer-oriented game. Eugen makes Steel Division 2, which has...well, better single-player support, including a strategic-map campaign and considerably more-sophisticated single-player tactical AI, but that covers World War II. Not that there's anything wrong with WWII, but there are a lot of games that cover it. Wargame: Red Dragon covered the late Cold War. I'd like to have a more-contemporary game; there isn't a lot of coverage of newer military hardware.
There are a couple of NSFW games I'd like to see more of, but you ruled those out, and I'm not sure that this is the best forum for those, anyway.
Moddable, open-world games. This is probably way out of scope for an indie developer, unless they create a whole new ecosystem. Bethesda is probably the premiere example of this, but there's a lot that Bethesda hasn't done that I'd like to see. They haven't really developed a very successful way to make more money off people playing their game in modded, which means that they don't have a lot of incentive to improve that, which I think is at the root of a lot of the other problems. I don't mind giving them more money, but I want them to improve the modding situation. I'd like to have solid diagnostic and script profiling tools, and preferably a standard language, like Javascript or Lua or something. I'd like to have support for parallelized scripting of some form, even if those need to run in isolation under constraints. I'd like to have a reasonably-sandboxed scripting environment, so that I don't need to be paranoid about downloading and using random mods -- something that is a chronic problem with many games and their mods. I'd like to have a system that can perform polygon generation and reduction dynamically -- like, a map specifies a Bezier curve, and throwing more hardware at it just lets the engine generate more polygons; that'd be friendly to games that are expected to be played for many years. Throw a model at the thing, and it -- maybe with some offline analysis -- can come up with some kind of a reasonably-simplified model to display at distance, automatically billboard the thing at range (I think that existing tools can do the latter for Bethesda's stuff). Keep loading out of the render threads so that loading doesn't cause the frame rate to hiccup (Starfield's engine is much better at this; I dunno how current Unreal is in open-world stuff). Avoid the limitations of static precombines in Fallout 4's engine (Starfield may do this; I'm not conversant enough with the internals); this prevented some objects from being removed at runtime, since the engine wasn't capable of recomputing data at runtime used for optimized display. I'd like to have support for more-sophisticated pathing, like for creatures that can jump and climb. I'd like to see in-game building support (not just for players, but for map development). I'd like to see profiling and suggestions (e.g. "this area of the map has the worst performance issues"). I'd like to see computer-assisted end-user diagnosing mods conflicts in the way that Conflict Catcher used to do for extensions on the classic Mac OS -- do a
git blame-style binary search across sets, enabling-and-disabling extensions and asking if a problem goes away, to try to find a single-extension problem in with a number of tests logarithmic in the number of mods, and able to find conflicts involving multiple extensions as well. I'd like to have support for streaming data from a remote system and having an engine that can run without data being fully-downloaded so that one can start playing before something is fully downloaded.Functionality I'd like to see improved upon
Features that I'd like to see used more
High-res DLC for pixel art games. Low-res pixel art can reduce art costs. That's great. But then, sometimes a game does really well. I'd like to be able to buy high-res art for it. Very few games have done this (Cave Story being one of the few).
Music available for purchase. I can at least understand not doing this for the few games that permit one to use arbitrary music playlists (like Stellaris).
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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.
Kenshi sounds amazing!! I can't wait to play it
Kenshi2 is in the works
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/233860/view/1599265246183370950