I am not exactly an indie dev (and I'd rather mod my ideas rather than do an entire game)
But I have been having these ideas lately about "vocational" types of games and such. Aka various job simulators, yeah. I am curious about maaany fields of work and I'd love to experience them in a form of a videogame at least, which imo has the potential to be an extremely educational format for this.
>a realistic factory manager simulator
>a realistic military simulator - from intelligence to piloting drones to rocket management to stormtrooping
>a simulator of laying down internet cables across the world (i am just curious how its done lol)
>being head of economics manager simulator (ie changing interest rates etc, trying to stay afloat)
Now obviously this is an already existing genre so there's probably a lot of stuff like these.
One of the most memorable of these for me was an "economic strategy game" from my childhood where you needed to manage wildlife conservation policies to upkeep the population of wild leopards in the Far East. The devs behind this game even said they will implement the best strategies irl. You had to manage policies towards feeding the prey animals in places where leopards live, funding animal sanctuaries, actually asking for funding period, managing policies against poachers, doing interviews and persuading famous people to your cause, etc etc. It's actually quite hard and I still can't understand how to win.
Now, the leopard population did improve nowadays since 2007 when the game was released or so… So maybe this worked.
Pic related, "Save the leopard" or Спасти леопарда. Maybe this is a good target for reverse engineering for the purposes of translation but it seems like a very hard project.
