I’ve got a problem. Every few weeks, I think of a video game that I urgently want to exist in the world. Unfortunately I am not in gamedev. Or maybe it’s very fortunate that I’m not; after all, games seems like a horrible industry to work in these days.

Regardless, I have decided to murder two avians with a single projectile: I’m going to write these ideas down here as they come. This will hopefully get them out of my head so they stop consuming precious creativity cycles in my brain, and also will provide easy fodder for me to increase my rate of posting here on this blog.

So without further hemming or hawing, here’s the first post of this series: Vampire Simulator 2017. (Do not expect creative titles for my game ideas.)

I got this idea while walking to a grocery store late at night. The nearby grocery store is open 24/7, and there’s basically no crime in my neighborhood, so it’s not unusual at all to see people walking around alone at midnight or even later. The town takes on a different cast by night. Mostly, it’s trees casting pools of infinite black in the moonlight, occasionally broken up by a yellow window in the darkness. I passed by a man’s house and saw his garage lit red and orange with night-vision protecting lights as he worked with some tools at a bench.

It’s beautiful, and a little spooky, and it reminded me of ARMA.

Okay, come back, I’ll get to the vampires soon, I promise.

Check out this video.

Pay special attention to the segment about how the lighting engine in ARMA is excellent for nighttime missions. How they have optimized it for large, outdoor spaces with many real time lights. Imagine an entire game played in that beautiful darkness, cut by all the lights and shadows of a modern city at night.

Now imagine how, instead of ARMA, the game is actually fun. Wouldn’t that be sick as hell? (As an aside: The problem with ARMA is that the campaign is buggy, the singleplayer is frustrating, and the controls are janky as fuck. You don’t know what killed you 90% of the time or what to do differently. You fight the controls as much as you use them. And when you’ve finally managed to achieve whatever Herculean task has been set to you in this particular scenario, there’s a 20% chance that the script will simply fail to fire and you’ll lose anyhow. Let’s wave a magic wand and say all those problems get fixed, okay?)

Imagine that instead of vast, howling wastelands where nobody lives and none of the buildings have furniture, the game map was focused on a segment of dense, urban terrain. Check out this map of Portland.

The black lines enclose a hypothetical game area. It’s about 217 square kilometers. ARMA 3’s big island, Altis, is 270 for comparison. Within these black borders, you have an incredibly diverse array of neighborhoods. There aren’t any real slums in Portland these days, but for the sake of gameplay, you could say that close in southeast was having a real bad case of urban blight or something if you really needed a rundown part of town. There’s nightclubs and warehouses, public service buildings and hospitals. Sleepy residential neighborhoods, and gleaming glass condo towers above hot nightlife districts. Let’s assume we have the technology to populate this place with enough NPCs to feel like a living, breathing city.

And then you wake up as a vampire in this city. You’ve got no friends, no job, no place to go back to. Hell you’re not even from Portland. But when you cross those borders you quickly come to realize–there’s no escaping Stumptown. Anywhere you cross out of the map, you get dumped back at some random other location, usually short on money and sporting some new wounds. Sometimes–very rarely–your little sojurns outside of PDX go well and you return home sated and with a bit more spending money. Most of the time, you run into the other denizens of the night who are not happy happy to see you. If you go into Wolf territory, it’s game over.

So you’re stuck here. And you’re dead. And the sun is coming up and oh fuck you’re burning oh god it hurts so much. And you get dragged into the shadows and kept alive by your sire, who gloats and sneers about how much you don’t know and how much you need her. Oh, she’s not going to help you for free, of course. In fact, she’s barely going to help you at all. But she’ll do you a solid to get you on your feet and then it’s sink or swim. She doesn’t need incompetent slaves. If you survive long enough to figure out how to be useful, she’ll have work for you. If not. Well. That’s a self-solving problem, isn’t it? But don’t think about going into business for yourself or (worse) for one of her rivals. Not until you’re ready to kill her–and buddy, she’s had a hundred years to get ready for you.

So now you’re at the meat of the game. Now you’re trying to survive. It’s a game of inches. Just get through the night. Find a place to stay when the killing star comes again. Grab a mouthful of blood when nobody’s looking. Understand that if you get caught or let anyone know you’re a vampire, you won’t survive long enough to regret it for too long.

You learn to hunt. You learn to roost. You learn to anticipate the patterns of mortal life, and how to insert yourself into them profitably. The day-night cycle is real time, and the calendar matters. Friday night downtown is very different than the warehouse district on Tuesday morning.

Soon enough you run into other vampires. Maybe they’re friendly. Maybe they’re not. Don’t worry about getting killed right away because you figure out fast that even among the Damned there are rules. The rules are not for your benefit. You’re okay with that right now, because at least they left you in good enough shape to crawl home. You get to that condemned storehouse you’ve been staying at, and fumble with broken fingers through your stuff. Her phone number is around here somewhere. She told you to call if you ever needed help and you’ll be damned if you–oh right. You’re Damned. You give her a call, she gloats, you bit your tongue and put up with it. Now the word is out that you’re one of hers. You can walk around without being jumped by other vamps. They still don’t want you in their territory, not unless you pay the toll, but in time you’ll find ways to finesse that.

In your feavered dreams during the day, you feel the Blood calling to you. You know what you must do now. You know what you must become. You could go out and greet the sun, but you know you’re not that strong. With a bracing dose of reality, you wake up to greet a new night. You will get your own back. You will learn to survive. One night at a time.

You could break into a house, drain the folks dry, sure. But you know by know that the next night, cops would be squatting the block like they own the place. That’s bad. You’re getting cagey now. Thinking two steps ahead. You break into a different house, ghoul the accountant that you find. Now you’ve got a named servant who goes about his business and generates you money. But your enemies are going to be looking for your servants; now you’ve got to protect him or lose face. So you go to a different neighborhood, a more dangerous one. You find someone who looks like they know how to fight. You mind probe them to be sure–yep, this one can throw down. Ghoul him, too. Now you tell him to be your account’s roommate. They hate each other, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is now your cash cow has a bodyguard and you don’t really have to worry about petty cash anymore.

Suddenly you have a real house to stay at. Suddenly you have a little bit of money.

Suddenly, the centuries stretch out before you, barren and empty of hope.

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This game would have a plot and recurring NPCs and meaningful player choices, but a lot of the time you’d spend simply trying to get through the next night. You want to keep yourself to yourself, or else the vampire hunters might come after you. If the hunters come after you, so will the other vampires–they don’t need you pulling down heat on them.

Your sire openly despises you, but that’s okay because you figure out that she’s not the be-all, end-all of vampire society. In fact, the local society is having a bit of an uproar at the moment, and a canny young revenant could find himself or herself vaulted to dazzling heights of power if they play their cards right.

Vampires move at a glacial speed. Every month or so, there’s a real big party where all the bloodsuckers get together to pretend they don’t despise each other. This month passes in real time. You can spend every single one of those nights hunting, scheming, doing dirty deals. Or you can fast forward to the next exciting bit, and get some algorithmically generated choices to make so that you don’t get left behind by the world. You’ve got 2 years to get out from under your sire’s thumb. Or maybe a decade, who knows? Seasons pass and years turn.

You develop your powers as a hunter of the night. I don’t envision the leveling process in this game to be a straight progression of power from weak to strong, but rather a specialization process. There are different vampire archetypes you could choose to inhabit, and you develop your skills to support them. Certainly your elders are stronger than you, but maybe not so much as they’d like you to believe. Maybe it’s more that they have the home field advantage.

If this sounds a lot like Masquarade, well, yeah. I fucking LOVE Bloodlines, but I’d want this to be uniquely its own thing. In Bloodlines, the sun never rises. You’re always hustled from one quest to another. Your influence on the story is sadly undercut by a few segments of unforgivable railroading. Most of all, it’s missing that feel of quiet desperation. There’s never a reason to flee back to your haven, hoping they aren’t following you. There’s an easy to find black market gun dealer right downtown. Most of all, hunting is restricted to just one or two major strategies–get this mortal alone and drain him. What if I want to seduce someone in a club? Or straight up blackmail them? Or break into their house while they sleep, take what I need, and let them call in sick tomorrow?

This game would be less about a grand, operatic drama about the fate of the city (though that would certainly be a background theme) and more about the struggle to get to the end of the night, the end of the week, the end of the month in better shape than you started it. It’s about being able to walk down any given street in the city and know that you can take anything you see, anything you want, and it will never replace what you’re missing. This game would be about dark freedom and painful loss. About coming to realize that you’ll never smile in the sun again.

It would be about being a smoking hot vampire babe who gives absolutely zero fucks.

I want this game so bad I can taste it. Pity I don’t have the 40 million dollars needed to buy it.