While I agree more sim games and types of games would be nice, I'd' disagree that there is a predominance of violence in accessible games, after all there are plenty of traditional card, board and puzzle games not to mention arcade games like blindfold barnyard that have nothing involved with violence, and several sports and sports management games.

The problem is more to do with sound and representation and the hole sterrio targeting thing as well as resources and development time and all the things we know well.

I'd also disagree thatgames with combat mechanics are "all the same"

Sinse even if games take the same theme, how that theme is handled can be entirely different. Compare for example swamp, audio defense zombie arena, epitaff mud, the browser game urban dead, and the choiceofgames title choice of zombies or zombi exodus.

All take the theme of a zombocalypse, but mechanically are extremely different. The more story based games emphasize the human elements, indeed both of the choiceofgames titles involve a lot about relationships among survivers. Epitaff mud, while it has zombie fighting has a lot of building and interacting with other players too, and the zombies in audio defense are definitely comic zombies.

Yes, we need more complex and involved audiogames, but I'd disagree that the fact that games have combat mechanics is the reason for this.

Btw, you might also consider that some of the best sim games we have! seen, noteably castaways do involve some element of constructing protection, sinse colonizing a new land isn't an easy matter. Indeed if you haven't checked out castaways, lunimals, and castaways ii I'd strongly recommend it.

If your looking for games about owning a company, Aprone's Umart, the game kapi regnum  or the online mud federation 2 might be just the thing your wanting.

Speaking of muds I'd also recommend checking This topic for some muds that focus on cooking, crafting and other none combat activities.

@Marta, while roguelikes themselves aren't accessible (though see the nethack access project for a dam good try), there are a few games with similar mechanics.

Kerkerkruip is the first that comes to mind, but there are also muds with procedurally generated random content, wayfare1444 for example. project Bob was the most extreme mud I know in terms of generating the hole world at randomand based on the player's choice, but last I checked it'd gone down after some drama though I did e-mail the admin and he said it'd be back.

I think some other muds have some sort of procedurally generated content, I do remember Dentin mentioning this for stellar eon but I'm not sure where that is at the moment.

As to open world games, if you mean games like skyrim or grand theft auto which are based on the idea of a huge world you can do anything in, well your best bet there are muds I think, particularly the more complex ones, ---- oh and yes I'm on a miner mud thing currently .

Plenty of games in the action genre can be varied and different, it's simply that few of our developers have experimented with different mechanics and variation of the same game. Even the space invaders clones, which is probably what our market has the most of, can be radically different and fun if the mechanics are different enough, differences have just not been tried. I for one would love to see more open world games, and I would especially like to see a good, solid action rpg.

Hi guys. The topic is so interesting. Yes, Stefan is right. If you need a good simulation and a complex game, I recomand for you king of dragon pass. I bought it last year and I find it so addicting. Everytime I start a new game, I feel something different. This game has near 600 events so the posibility to receive the same event again is small.

I'd like zombie survival games, but seriously not shooting. I want something that requires strategy, more than just being thrown in the field, kill kill kill, pick up items, get points, buy upgrade, kill again, see score...something like that. It's kinda boring for me

Well, I'll tell you my opinion.
I never played any mainstream games before, only audiogames. In fact, the only mainstream game that I've tryed was Icy Tower and Super Mario for DOS. Thus, as a developer, I can't write games of genres that I never played. I personally don't care about genre, I just care about if game is enjoyable enough for me to play it.

Well strictly speaking "simulation games" could also count games like lone wolf and gma tank commander sinse those simulate driving vehicles and commanding. I'm not sure if Kodp counts as simulation, though then again kodp is really hard to put a genre on precisely sinse it's got all sorts of different elements from resource management to gamebook ones.

@Abdullah, there are actually a fare few audio adventure and story driven games, it's becoming quite a genre, particularly sinse the games often mix action sequences with the story. Soul trapper and I believe blind legend, cygnas and the ticon blu games, graille to the thief and indeed several more. The prob lem is such games are rather major to produce due to all the audio.
If your willing to play in text though there is far more available in terms of story driven games from rpgs to gamebook titles to interactive fiction and muds.

I'm afraid your use of "anime" here is a little missleading. "anime" in japan simply means animation. %50 of all tv programs in japan are animated, which includes a wide genre of things from romantic comedies to cop shows to horro.What people generally refer to as "anime" ie, things witha theme of martial arts, killer robots, epic battles, scifi elements, magic and ninjas and aliens and ghosts and demons all smooshed together is generally drawn from shonan or youth based anime, but it's no more accurate to assume all Japanese animated programs have these elements than it would be to assume every film produced in the west has super heroes and big explosions.

That out of the way I take it by "anime games" you mean rpg style games with the shonan type of theme detailed above. Again, this depends upon story etc, and with the difficulties producing audiogames your probably best looking into text games such as some of the Choiceofgames titles (Samurai Hyuga, mecha ace or choice of the ninja for instance), or trying out several of the muds like three scapes which have that sort of theme, indeed three scapes might suit you.

As to arcade games, well people were saying back in 2006 exactly the same thing. What I am noticing now is that because a lot of developers start out with arcade games as practice games, there are  a lot of smaller games around which perhaps could do with a trifle more polish if they're intended to be arcade games of the standard we've had in the past. Pinball extreme and alien outback for example (not to mention some of the bsc and lworks games when they were developing), were extremely well put together games for what they were, for example not just working on "how fast can you react"

I suspect we'll see more resource management games in the future as more developers gain skill with programming, particularly sinse it's a genre we don't have muh representation in, though I'd be sorry if we didn't see any well produced action games again.

Action can be a good thing so long as it's well thought out and doesn't just run down to a react as fast as possible to an incoming sound type response.

Epitaph has some complicated stuff we can do, but honestly, too many of them. Combat screen and skill check seems to be its pain, and the reason why I draw back from the mud even though I admittedly love the concept and nearly everything about it to death. Can't recall how many times I refresh my char, wait for new patch, replay, refresh again just to see the next skill set. It's more of a game where you reward yourself heavily by your action, and get punnished severely by your action as well. Takes forever to be good at, but worth it. I'm not gonna play it though, unless it has an optional port I can connect from my university.

Hey dark, you should take a look at my epitaph soundpack. I made a sound bar kind of like in alter, but in epitaph. At this point I think someone's taken it and changed it up, but I have no idea. The original download link is https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/818 … _E_1.0.zip

As for the original topic though, if you have a problem with the way games are being made these days, then pick up a manual on how to code and make the vision you see.
That isn't me being rude and saying you're ungrateful. That's me saying we need more developers.

Coding isn't a magical ability. The developers we have are people who had a vision at some point and they were like hey I'm going to make that, and so they sat down and came up with a bunch of rules and then turned those rules into code.
If you know how to give instructions to someone you know how to code already. The rest is just learning the syntax.

When I first started to learn to code I realized that there was more to making a game than just coming up with an idea and then writing the code. You really have to be familiar with the type of game you're creating. I have most familiarity with RPG and FPS type games. If someone came up to me and asked me to make an RTS like sound RTS, I might get something close because I can play their game and re-construct the mechanics, but it more than likely won't be anything new and innovative. The games that are new and innovative come from people like yourself who see a type of game that isn't being made the way they envision it and then, rather than wait for someone else to make it, create it themselves.

Which client are these soundpacks for? I prefer vipmud for muds personally, though I do use the mushZ alter client. Really though I'd prefer if the combat in epitaff was just not spammy enough to cause trouble even with basic text display, actually I've now played several muds and I'd say epitaff has one of the worst, even bog standard unmodified dicu combat in a fast game like Aardwolf isn't so bad in terms of all the numbers and random stats being constantly pumped out.

@MArta, the problem is we're back to the sounds and resources problem again. remember that graphical open world games are made by massive companies with hundreds of coders and artists and huge amounts of money going into sound archives. To do that sort of thing from scratch in audio would not only take a staggering amount of code, but a staggering amount of sounds too, and unlike graphic artists you cannot just make sounds out of nothing, you need actual sounds from different sources which can be hard to find and expensive.

On the other hand, I'm deeply impressed with how detailed the worlds in some muds are in terms of activities, things to interact with and have an effect on the environment. Effectively, games like clok are! open world games, (and many have been running a long time), they just use text as their interface.

I'd also love to see some resource management type of games in the future too, though I think that will happen, heck we're already getting on better in that line than we have for years thanks to developers like Aprone.

Mata, that’s not too bad, considering where the Mush-Z folks got some of their music…

Lol:) Some companies do conserve their resources though. I don't wanna have commercial problem, heh.