Wild ideas

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• Used and closed: Start the game at level 2. Above only weak, hidden, assassin monsters. Below a real infestation of monsters. The player starts very weak, until he claims the resources on levels 2 and 1. Then he's ready to wake the nasties.
• Let there be waves of monsters coming from lower levels to the next upper level at random intervals. Let the waves originate only from levels down to the deepest level where any monster killed by the player. After a wave comes to a level, the monsters mix and the next wave from this level will have monsters of mixed depth. The mixing may be involve monster killing weaklings, mating, forming squads.
• Perhaps generate object bonuses and monster statistics from 5 random numbers, as discussed in issue 11. That may work well with procedural monster generation based on monster\s intended level. Or it may not.
• The next few ideas are about physics and tiles, see Gameplay the context. They are written in a fantasy dungeon language, but may be even more suited for realistic physics game.
• More about the unification of missiles and gases (and, partially, throwing). When an arrow is shot and hits a wall it drops down. With a potion, it explodes. With a rubber ball, it bounces in random direction (the wall is rough). With a smell or a gas (or fog or smoke), it multiplies and bounces in all 8 principal directions. Gases and smells additionally vanish after a given time (quickly for gases, slowly for smells). The Andres' idea that the flight of things should take time, plays nicely here. Arrows fly fast, potions slower, gases just one tile per turn, smells probably slower still.
• If bouncing is used to spread hero's smell, each bounce should also reduce the smell strength, to limit the radius of smell. Bouncing in only 8 directions will leave some tiles free of the smell, which is not so bad (the hero peeked in, panicked, but luckily fled unnoticed). I hope it won't lead to micromanagement (player calculating which convoluted route to take to send least smell to a nearby dozing monster). Hmm, this smell model is getting too complex: smell ray-tracing, not less. Perhaps we should stick with the model of hero leaving stationary smell for a number of turns and that's all.
• OTOH, the spreading smell may nicely model monsters waking up when the hero moves nearby. Closing doors would at last be useful for something. I don't particularly like monsters waking up when the hero just got out of sight, but perhaps that can be helped by increasing the chance of waking up not only with the smell inhaled, but also with the hero in sight. Heh, in other rougelikes, melee and shooting increases the amount of noise made by the hero, while here it would make the hero more smelly. :)
• Back to bouncing: when a potion explodes, it releases gases, which deals damage starting in the same turn and last a number of turns specific to the kind of damage and spreads during these turns, bouncing, as described above. For example, if the potion is a flask of nitroglycerin, the gas is mostly air, it last only one turn and the damage is physical and huge. If the glass is vial of poison, the gas is poisonous, it lasts for a few turns and deals some damage every turn, of poison type (which may poison monsters for a much longer time, depending on the damage value and monster Resistances).
• Since we have robot enemies, let there be various AIs for them that mimic what the player does: in opposite direction, with a delay, each action twice, etc. No randomness. For robots this is realistic, for animals and aliens it's not.
• One more plot angle: the threat that aliens or humans can blow up the ship. Depressurizing the ship is not such a big threat, since rooms are then automatically locked and not much air is lost. Neither is disable life support a big threat, since it's distributed, in walls. A big enough explosion is a threat, however. So, perhaps aliens sometimes retreat and don't kill you off nor kill unconscious players, because they fear the autodestruction scenario. For the heroes, they may have doubts about finishing aliens. Perhaps one more game goal, to make sure they don't melt down the reactor. Otherwise ending with blowing the ship up.
• Represent levels as trees, visualize trees as nested rectangles (corresponding to subtrees). This is more realistic for a ship than little rooms and long twisty corridors of roguelikes, because all the space gets used. It naturally produces differently flavoured areas: subtrees, where flavours can be subtly varied at each node (rectangle).
• Human objects are fixed, though some may need identification, but alien objects should be randomly generated. An alien object always starts in a possession of an alien capable of using it fully, so it may take many attempts and a long wait to finally claim a particularly strong object and by that time it's strength won't influence the game balance that much. An example of self-balancing.
• Whenever a hero is incapacitated, the skirmish ends, camera cuts back to the base and some inventory objects are lost (choosing them will be tricky so that, e.g., the heroes don't carry junk to protect valuable object from being lost). Nothing is lost permanently and the particular victorious band of monsters keeps its equipment (and perhaps gain some from the players) and roams the dungeon close by. If no monster remains nearby, the party may similarly warp back to the base, gathering all loot from the immediate area automatically. Determining if there are any monsters nearby may be the only function of the sense of hearing.
• The aliens write a letter (a suicide letter, say) pretending one of the humans wrote it. But the Contact is still weak, so they write it in Classical Greek instead of English.
• DIY weaponss ideas: firethrower (alcohol/petrol/what else?, need to be distilled/obtained somehow), pressured air crossbow, Molotov's coctail, pipe cut diagonally at the end, sharpened triangle sheet of steel, electric arc powered by battery; some DIY weapons may need electric current and if taken from the spaceship's electrical circuit, the cable reduces the range and some rooms don't have electricity or it's turned off during combat; if from batteries, they run off.
• when including police and army into the fray, remember about the trend to privatize these services (so mercenaries) and use of remote-controlled or semi-autonomous robots;
• while Earth is stagnant, the rest of the solar system is akin to the Wild west. The Moon and the Asteroid Belt are more densely populated so are more like Mexican border or East Cost, but the rest is so sparsely populated that not many social problems emerge that would require the intervention of states or complex organization and people generally self-organize successfully. It may also be a bit similar to the beginnings of the crude oil industry or the Internet industry, where there is plenty of opportunities, not much competition and the states don't yet know what to ban and what to allow, so it's mostly self-regulated. So, the rockets and life support must become cheap, concessions for exploration and extraction in space must be cheap or not needed, e.g., due to undefined jurisdiction. Little space crime/piracy (outside Moon/Asteroid Belt), since if you can afford the equipment and withstand the discomfort of space travel, then running a normal space business is easy and as lucrative.
• more about the stagnant Earth: megacorporations more powerful than most (all?) states; territories leased from other countries and mercenaries let states act unofficially and flexibly almost as much as corporations can, which makes restricting free speech and other rights easier. anyway, popular, mass culture and news sources are mostly globalised and, regardless, concentrated in a few hands and so totally dominated by official optimism, political correctness and cheap comfort. Officially you can become a millioner or a president, in reality, on Earth it's almost impossible due to taxation, regulations and long ago divided spheres of economic influence. New unemployment, due in part to computers and robots, is fought mostly by creating fictional jobs in administration, but also contributes to widening sphere of hereditary unemployment. Governmental stipends, TV, computer games and local social life keep permanently unemployed people entertained.
• let there be no aliens, but a Von Newman's probe that is programmed to initiate Contact at all costs and produces alien robots, warps local robots and animals, to obtain the goal. BTW, some robots may be programmed to pretend being aliens or humans or even not to know they are robots. This explains why the enemies are different every game, explains why the evil mastermind is not easy to understand and a bit stupid sometimes, avoids showing aliens, which would undermines the horror and require lots of work to be believable and communicable at the same time. The probe will also try to match its creations to humans, which explains why they are not that original and sometimes even vaguely humanoid.
• turbulent movement: when enough mass is moved from one level to another (research the physics!), let the ship's movement become turbulent, resulting in moving every actor one step in a d direction, each k steps. The pattern can be changed by redistributing mass. AI helpless. Perhaps make a bit random or complex, not to be overused by micromanagement. Perhaps use to limit movement of mass between levels.
• an idea from 7DRL Rook: sometimes, when a move would get a character incapacitated, let him slip instead, or otherwise fumble, or perhaps experience an alien intervention through ship's tumble forces or the light being switched off, a small animal/robot jumping down from the ceiling
• add sound effects, but only of things the player does not see; perhaps also sound cues, ominous sounds when something bad happens, e.g., a monster is spawned, will appear around a corner next turn, levels up, finds an object
• an idea from Vicious Orcs: give character background when looking at the character avatar, similarly with special terrain features and plot elements
• another inspired by Vicious Orcs: bring up inventory menu with 'i' or via mous;, move and select with dir keys and enter or with mouse; exit after the first action performed, unless a different key is used (with Shift?)
• have a funny way to quit (or start over). Something more interesting and flavourful than pressing Q, but not much more difficult. Show a screen of stats of how this crew would fare in the future and what their end would be.
• steal stuff from kusemono by Oohara Yuuma. We already share things by coincidence, e.g., digital FOV with recursive shadowcasting, peeking into other levels in examine mode, repeating a key cancels command, monsters remembering last visible hero position. Compare those and steal perhaps monster sight, its visualization by cardinal direction lines originating at heroes, heard monsters denoted by ?, monster attitudes, monsters sharing heroes positions, stabbing.
• add elements of minesweeper, but for building things intead of discovering mines, with hard difficulty, but when stepping on the "mine" only wastes some time, not destroys anything.
• avoid everything in http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=293417
• justify the significant role of state (and state police), despite the power of corporations, by mentioning that all banks went bankrupt during an economic crisis and were nationalized, so the state manages the money and takes the profits from that activity. No need to go into the details about the scale of underground banking, etc.
• not so wild an idea: keep checking that we adhere to most principles of http://www.incursion-roguelike.org/TechPaper%20%28Web%20Version%29.htm