Games I’d Love to Make

In 2025, the gaming industry is bigger than ever. I have a decent-sized list of games on my Steam wishlist that grows all of the time, a list of games that I want to return to and replay, and beyond those, there are likely literally hundreds of existing games that I could play and fall in love with. In other words, it’s not exactly difficult to find good games these days.

And yet in spite of that, there are still some things missing in the industry. Games that I’d love to make, or, let’s be real, have somebody else make for me so that I can play them. What do you want from me? I make visual novels, and these are, like…games that have action.

JoJo May Cry

Although I was a bit of a latecomer to the series, I really like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. It’s exciting and engaging, and has some of the best fights in all of anime. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but nevertheless knows how to have shocking and tense moments. It’s a great series, and one of my favourite anime.

You know what else I really like? Devil May Cry. While I’m sure that plenty of people will disagree with me on this, for my money it has the best combat in gaming. It’s fast-paced and rewards players for memorising enemy attack patterns, changing up their moves, and it feels like every different attack type is unique, with its own place in the combat.

So…you know what would be a fucking awesome game? A JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure game with Devil May Cry-esque combat. In my mind, it would focus more on the first two parts (Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency) - both because Hamon would work better in the combat system, and because I really like Battle Tendency.

Jonathan would focus more on close combat, acting like Dante does when using Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the like. Joseph would have more long-range options, and would have a few different simple items that he could switch between - clackers, a bottle, that sort of thing. It’d be easy to have most enemies be vampires created by either Dio or the Pillar Men, with different variants because, well, why not?

The fast pace of Devil May Cry would suit JoJo’s very well, and it’d be easy to come up with a lot of different cool moves for both the protagonists and their enemies. Of course, the real appeal would be the boss fights against Dio and the Pillar Men. The story would probably have to change slightly to accommodate the gameplay - I can’t imagine racing Wamuu in a chariot race would be that smooth - but otherwise, I think that this could be a really cool mashup.

Fullmetal Souls

As much as I like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, there are a handful of anime that I like more. The series that still has yet to be topped for me has for a long time been Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. (Technically I read the manga first, but if you just refer to it as Fullmetal Alchemist people often assume you’re talking about the 2003 anime). While my understanding is that there are some adequate Fullmetal Alchemist video games, none of them have really achieved that much acclaim.

So with that in mind, how about a Fullmetal Alchemist game that implements Souls-like gameplay? All of the homunculi would make for incredible bosses, and it’s surprising how well most of them would fit into a Dark Souls game with no changes needed to their designs or combat style. Even many of the non-homunculi characters, like Lin Yao, Paninya, or Barry the Chopper could make for engaging enemies that would provide a variety of different challenges.

The only catch is that in order to make this work I think that you’d need to take out, or heavily downplay, the alchemy aspect of the world. There’d be no way to realistically implement creative and flexible alchemy, and trying to go too hard into it probably wouldn’t end up being as satisfying as people would hope for. For the most part, I think the player character would just be somebody with a single sword or melee weapon (perhaps an automail arm that doubles as a weapon?), and alchemy would be limited to one or two specific attacks, or alternatively, the in-universe way to heal.

Even with that limitation, however, I still think that this would end up being a really cool game. There’s much of the world in the series to still be explored, and Souls-likes are easily one of the most popular game genres at the moment. With focused combat and use of a large variety of characters, this could result in an overwhelmingly popular Fullmetal Alchemist game, even among people who don’t know the series.

Silent Hill, but…

This is more of a story pitch, because in all honesty? Silent Hill 2 and 3 already have more or less the ideal gameplay for the survival horror genre. Yes, the puzzles can sometimes be a bit contrived or silly, and the combat is rough at best, but they nevertheless work to create a surreal and creepy atmosphere, which matches the desired tone of the games perfectly. Both of them still hold up today, and I don’t see any reason to mess with their formula.

Anyway, my story pitch is that the game’s protagonist arrives at Silent Hill for whatever reason, and there are soon hints that there’s something dark in their past, some sort of horrible act that they’ve committed. In other words, it looks like it’s ripping off the iconic twist of Silent Hill 2, just like Silent Hill Origins, Homecoming, and Downpour (to one extent or another). Given that there are a lot of complaints in the Silent Hill fandom about the later games attempting to recreate the twist, this sounds terrible.

However…there’d then be a bit of a meta-twist to the story. As the game progresses you’d find out that, no, the protagonist didn’t do anything horrible. They believed that they were guilty, and they were blaming themselves, but they would find some sort of evidence that would prove that they weren’t to blame. This would probably happen around the three-quarters point of the game, but it could potentially even happen around halfway through the game if the pacing would work; it’s a bit difficult to say without fleshing out the story beyond this very bare-bones idea.

What’s the point of the whole thing? I think that a story like this would be a nice inversion of the usual Silent Hill story. Many of them are about the town of Silent Hill drawing a protagonist to it in order to punish and torture them, and it’s fairly predictable and repetitive in my opinion. This story would be about healing, forgiveness, and improving one’s mental health. Admittedly, working out the details of how and why Silent Hill is still so terrifying might be a bit of an ordeal, but I think that it would end up being a minor enough thing to sort out in the grand scheme of things.

Midnight Suns II: Mutant Boogaloo

Around the start of last year, I played Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the turn-based tactics game from the developers of XCOM in which you and a group of Marvel’s most popular characters work together to fight some spooky bad guys using the power of trading cards. While I played plenty of great games last year, it was easily my favourite - the gameplay was incredibly enjoyable, the story was fun, and it did a great job of capturing the world of Marvel Comics.

Unfortunately, in spite of a great tease for a sequel at the end, the game didn’t sell well enough, and so no further games will be coming. Given what the rest of this list has been about, you can guess why I’m mentioning it: I’d love a sequel to Midnight Suns to be made. Beyond just the game’s own set-up of a sequel, however, I have a few different ideas for what a new game could focus on, story-wise.

The first idea is to make the sequel focus entirely on the X-Men. They’ve got a large and varied roster, and so it would be very easy to pick out plenty of members to fill out the game’s list of characters. We haven’t gotten a decent X-Men-focused game since the X-Men Legends series, which came out well over twenty years ago at this point. Since the X-Men have so many characters, a game focusing on a team and multiple characters would be the best way to showcase them, and Midnight Suns’ style of deckbuilding turn-based tactics would lend itself well to doing so.

The second idea is a bit simpler, but I think that it could still be fun. In a nutshell: create a new game with the same mechanics, but set it in the Silver Age, using cel-shaded graphics. It would probably be a bit goofier and have lower stakes, but with the right execution it would be enjoyable enough that people wouldn’t care. The Silver Age gives you a lot of different story potential, and I can’t be the only one who liked the Freedom Force games, right?

While these pitches do need to be fleshed out quite a bit, I nevertheless think that the core concepts show a lot of promise, and with the right direction would be great games to play. Sure, they’re a bit simple, but simple is often just the start in creating something complex. What do you think? Are there any dream game concepts that you’re holding out hope for? Let me know what games the world is missing, and how you’d like to see them work.