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Offering 2–5 [free] [concept] pitches per project

A topic by RootNeg1Reality created May 23, 2025 Views: 941 Replies: 14
Viewing posts 1 to 5

Writer’s block? Need a twist ending? Missing a character or two? Monsters feeling bland? Just feeling uninspired?

Hi, I’m RootNeg1Reality, and I have what I’d call a methodical imagination—I can turn it on and off and make it work on demand. I’m driven by curiosity and energized by originality. I live for the moment of finding something I’ve never seen before. Concepts and creative solutions are what happen when I face a challenge and explore the possible.

Send me a link to your game/project or describe what you're working on. I’ll pitch you 2–5 ideas tailored to your needs—no charge, just for the joy of it. Let’s spark something together—or better yet, build a bonfire.

If you like what I bring to the table, feel free to reach out about deeper collaboration or consultation. Thanks!

Hello! I have bit of a problem, and it sounds like you might be able to help!

I've been working on a turn-based, top-down online RPG (hesitate to use MMORPG, because the game aims to be tiny) for around six months now, and I've just started a big refactor/rewrite. I'm still enjoying making it, and I'm excited with what it is, but, it feels like it's missing something? A hook, a twist, a sort of je ne se quoi.

As far as keeping things fun long-term and encouraging community I think the game concept is strong as it is, and I have some good ideas for how to expand it. But what would make someone want to download this game? Why would someone booting it up for the first time - potentially to an empty server - want to get invested enough to engage with the game's community (if any) and the deeper systems? The game doesn't have a strong setting either - just generic fantasy by default - and no story to speak of.

Let me describe the game. I'll try to keep it brief:

The main loop revolves around gathering materials from harvest nodes / monster drops in randomly generated dungeons, alongside up to 4 other players, then returning to the town hub to craft/upgrade gear from the materials. A bit like Monster Hunter come to think of it, except the hub is multiplayer and the combat turn-based. The only other area is a home base unique to each player, which can be decorated, and crops can be grown for potions and other various purposes.

There are three main goals of development: first, a deep crafting system, with a variety of tweaks and subsystems to put each player in a unique position for progression and builds. There's also a heavy focus on encouraging player interaction, with cooperation and trading heavily incentivized. It also leverages some cheap mobile game engagement tactics - minus the aggressive microtransactions. For example, players can only initiate a limited number of dungeon runs per day (but may accompany others freely); crops are grown in real time, sometimes taking multiple real days to grow; there are daily rewards and exclusive time-locked items abound.

So that's the problem. I'm looking for a strong setting or driving force to make things pop (early on in particular) despite the small scale of the game. Story is tricky - since there aren't many different settings, and the world is shared - but if you have thoughts there, or for the setting, or a mechanical twist, I'd love to hear them. Since I'm doing some big rewrites, I'm open to big changes.

Thank for reaching out. I really like the concept and it sounds fun. I really like the idea of guiding players to be nice to one another so I leaned into that a lot with my ideas. I hope you will lean into it too, it's a fun way to run things!

1. Party diamonds. Sell for real world cash a diamond that throws a party and rewards all players in the area. Getting players to dance and party with you can help the user of the diamond in some ways. This will encourage players to organize a fun event in game with their friends or strangers.

2. The game is real and the real world is fake. (Or an evil wizard did it!) The story is that an evil wizard fragmented reality to make it look fake. All the people detach from reality and become like animals so that he can control them. In that way the player "is from Earth", but according to the story, Earth is just a fantasy and the game is the real world.

3. Players are monsters. All the monsters are actually people that are disassociating and you don't kill them, but suppress them until they wake up. Could be a fun mechanic if each player becomes a kind of monster of themselves like a werewolf when they are logged out. "Killing" or suppressing them could help them rest better when they come back online.

4. Players write the story for their friends. When each player finishes a quest, he is given the ability to write the dialog for that quest. When each player starts a quest, the dialogue is pulled at random from other users, with a heavy preference for friends. Might be hard to moderate this, but if you can pull it off, it would be super fun.

It kind of makes sense if a wizard has twisted reality, each person is trying to help find the truth of how reality works and make it real again. (Hint hint, immerse your friends!)

5. A friendship based skill tree that gives you abilities you wouldn't normally lock up like the ability to have a friend list or send mail or emojis and weird stuff. It would put the community stuff further at the core of the game. Also this can help with moderating spammers and ad bots.

6. Crafting/home building dynamic NPCs. You said you wanted a custom home for each player and deep crafting. I suggest you roll those into one thing and randomize NPC spawning at the players home depending on what stuff he has placed and if it's cozy and such. You can also tie the crafting into the player home as well to make it feel like a tight system.

I guess that was six, but I like your idea and wanted to explore it a bit for my own fun.

Let me know if you want to hire me for some more serious and thought out ideas. Right now I'm mostly doing this for fun and to build up a portfolio, but I can go as serious as you want. I can do a lot better with a deeper look into the actual game and getting to know you better so that I can make a cohesive whole rather than just these quick ideas.

Either way I hope this helps you get back on track!

Wow, those are some great ideas! You definitely picked up on the vibe I'm going for with the game, and each of those would fit in perfectly. I'm impressed.

I'm a long way from doing anything real with this project (or any other, for that matter), but I'd be interested in collaborating on something down the line. Do you have an email/discord/etc where I can reach out?

Thank you. Glad you like them. I have a discord with the same name: RootNeg1Reality

That's the easiest for me. Feel free to reach out.

Hey my friend! If it is for free and for fun, i would be very gladfull! https://halkind.itch.io/help-me-hide-the-body - it is my second  horror  visual novel, it is very short ( less than 20 minutes reading), and i want to expand it to something more than 15 minutes gameplay. What do you think about this? Thank you for your feedback in advance!

(+1)

Hi. Unfortunately I'm not sure when I can get a chance to get out my computer and look at it. I'll see if it's possible tomorrow, but I can't promise anything right now. Sorry, hope you understand.

Brother no worries! I will tell you here shortly: the main character, who lives in the small village with parents ( he is 14 years old ) opens the door, there was a girl the same age he barely knows. The first words of the girl are such: " Help me hide the body". He was shocked, he understood she is not kidding, but MC decided to ignore her and get back gome. In this way, she tells him that she literally knows everything about his life for last 2-3 days ( what he has done each his free minute) , also some strange her friends are always looking around in his house and watching him from the outside. Is there any way to expand this game for several choices? I would be glafull! 

Hey. Do you have an ending finished/locked in or are you open to changing that? I'm a little unsure if you want ideas to make the story longer or more scary or a twist ending or what exactly. I'll probably have a chance to try it out in a few hours, as long as I can get it working on Linux, but I'm just not sure what you are looking for.

(+1)

Hi. So I'm going to go ahead and give you some ideas, I'm not sure if I have the direction and tone right, but I'll takes some guesses and give it a go.

1. Go with her to hide the body.

I think you should have a line of the main character going along with this madness. Maybe a few branches that all result in death. In this line of story, you can recontextualize the ending.

The main character can follow along and try to learn more. His schoolmate can keep gaslighting him into thinking the body is in some impossible place like under a small bucket. When questioned she can get more and more erratic and stress how they have to hurry and come up with more and more excuses like how the rest of the body is hidden underground (in the sidewalk) that she claims is hollow.

When it seems impossible for the body to be underground, the main character would fight and eventually fall into a hole. The schoolmate would tell him not to move around because he might touch the body, and throw in dirt to "help him climb out". This ends with the main character being buried alive and she can hint at this being her own fate.

No body is actually seen.

2. Calm/distract her at the door.

After getting in the house and locking up he can try to calm her down and distract her by chatting with her. She mocks him for his efforts and in doing so she hints that if she was him, she would want to speak to his parents due to some unresolved stuff.

She might say something like "it's important to tie up loose ends. You wouldn't want to get trapped in some endless nightmare trying to resolve things forever, right?" Hinting that something like this happened to her and that she's suffering from not resolving some important thing.

When it seems like he is getting though to her, someone can hit him from behind.

3. Run for it.

I'm not sure exactly when you would put this in, but I think it's something most players would want to do when in this kind of situation, by not having this, you are leaving something important unaddressed.

That said, what exactly you want her to do is hard for me. It depends on the exact tone you want. Generally you would want it to be a kind of inescapable situation, but it also might be fun to make him find something that he suspects might be the body.

Personally I love that you don't know if there's actually a body. I say keep that and just build the tension by having him worry that he ran right where she wanted by accident.

Perfect place for a jump scare bad ending.

4. Scratching at the door.

As mentioned in my review, I think it would help things a bit to add a scratching sound that stops when he hits the door. I would also change it to "without knowing what else to do I..."

In my experience, the audience always want the main character to do something special. Even if he is just panicking, it should make some difference, even if that is by coincidence.

Also it's just creepy to have some unexplained scratching.

---

I hope these ideas help some, I want to match your tone and style, but I'm not sure of that so you will have to use your best judgement on what fits. If you put all this together I think it hints at something specific going on behind everything, but at the same time the story is open. This often works really well for horror. The trick will be making it clear that one ending is "the best" for a particular reason. I don't want to change the main ending, so my hope is to make the others add information that makes your ending better than just death. Hope that makes sense. Good luck!

Hey! Thank you so much for so big review! It has good ideas! Are you a professional in this?

Thanks. I'm happy it helped. My goal is to become a professional in this kind of thing. If you use any ideas please let me know.

Your offer sounds intriguing. Is it still actual?

If so, you may be interested to look at my free deck-builder game:
https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown
I tend to think that I have quite a lot of creative ideas myself, but I always enjoy discussing (and perhaps implementing) other people suggestions. So whatever your mind produces: new mechanics, cards, monsters, or anything else -- I would like to hear.
You can answer here or on our discord.

I've been thinking about shutting this down, but I haven't yet.

Thank you for making it work on my phone. Love that.

Number one, the tutorial needs some work. This isn't any idea or concept, but just advice about tutorials. You packed a lot of information in there and it's nice how detailed it is, but I think it would be better to allow players to skip it all and get to the game if they want to try. A lot of us know how discarding cards works already from other games.

Consider this. Put all the text in a menu that gives information about the game. Allow players to goof around with only the three card deck and then make a few other random stages for the tutorial. Each one introduces a basic concept that needs to be mastered before you can progress. Things like getting the full stats of an item by hovering over it (or as I learned on my own, long pressing the card). Give them multiple cards that all look mostly or even actually the same, but have important information hidden in the full description. Have the game punish them with a tutorial pop-up only if they fail to get the right card.

If the player is really lost and confused, they will have the text in the menu to fall back on.

Number two, right now my first impression is to wonder why I'm playing a old game (I understand it's under active development, but I wouldn't have know that if you didn't link me to it). It looks like it's from 25 years ago and this isn't addressed in the game from what I've seen or even in the game page. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with 25 year old style games, but it puts a question mark in my mind.

Consider adding some flavor text or unusual graphics that hint at the game being based on that style, but with a modern take. Then the question mark becomes a hook. "Does that zombie have a smartphone or a magic book with icons?" Is a lot more interesting than "why is this game old looking?"

Number three, speaking of a modern take, consider showing the cards you will draw. Perhaps as an item or class if there isn't one already. If there is, consider making it far far more common. Ideally you could even allow players to stack a plan of moves and commit to them all at once for a bonus.

Right now there is a lot of cases where there's simply a right move to make. It isn't particularly fun knowing that a simple machine could be trained to do what I'm doing. By making things less random you allow players to plan moves in advance. The mechanical moves become filler that confuses finding perfect moves in the future. By lowering the randomness you can allow players to plan and strategize way more and way deeper.

Right now, it looks like luck and skill will be needed to win. Why does this game need luck?

I'm going to stop at four because I've had a long day, but lastly, I'm not sure exactly the tone you are going for, but the game could have a basic optional story and some basic art that depicts the hero as someone that lost his cognitive abilities due to combat and journal of fighting instructions. The cards are pages from his journal that help him remember how to fight. As he picks them up he learns better how to fight, but because they are ripped he keeps mixing them up. Each class can actually be the same guy with just different sets of pages that put on display a fraction of his power.

The story could have to do with not only collecting all the pages, but also organizing them in a helpful way when he has limited ability to think. You don't need to go all out, but a few basic comments about his unstable perspective of figuring out that he is the best fighter in the world could get players pumped about the idea of playing with cards and strategizing them.

Hope that helps.

(1 edit)

Thanks, your perspective is indeed quite unique, as promised :)

>the tutorial needs some work.
>allow players to skip it all and get to the game
I have tried this, but every time I make tutorial optional some new players miss important concepts like status effects.

>why I'm playing a old game
I did use words like 'minimalist graphics' in game description before, but 'condensed' it all down to just saying 'traditional' in current description. This is indeed a game for more advanced players who do not care much about graphics, and focus more on strategy / gameplay. I actually compared this game to ASCII-graphics roguelikes.

>with a modern take ... zombie have a smartphone
Interesting idea, but I'll pass. I'd rather keep 'simple/classic fantasy' theme with some easter eggs here and there, but not too much goofiness

>consider showing the cards you will draw.
>If there is, consider making it far far more common.
There is indeed such a mechanics, called 'clairvoyance'. It is rare (as usual for deckbuilders). I will consider making more cards/items for it.

>it looks like luck and skill will be needed to win. Why does this game need luck?
That's very original take on roguelikes in general, and especially deckbuilders.
I concur that 'luck-less' (i.e. completely deterministic) roguelike/deck-builder game is very fascinating concept, but it needs a LOT of brainstorming to make it viable. From hundreds of games in this genre, I can not remember a single one without randomness built into the core.
Thanks for this idea, maybe someday I will invent a way to make such a game.

>the game could have a basic optional story
Yeah, I intentionally omitted story / lore to focus on gameplay, but maybe you are right. I will add some more flavor texts at least.

Your post was thought-provoking, thanks again.