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This thread was originally just my idea, but after it was suggested to me, I asked Amanda to change the title to "game ideas general" (Thanks Amanda!). Post your game ideas here!

I will add descriptions of other people's games if they request in PM.

Here is my game idea. This is what I will primarily be posting about in this thread.:

A game that takes the good stuff from Kerbal Space Program and Sim City, then turns it into a two-dimensional 4x game.

You start on a planet with a small population of little cubular robots with treads on the bottom. They can convert food and water into power. They are controlled like any other RTS, letting you have them gather resources from the environment. You can build structures that are used to make machines and more robots. You need to fend off wild animals and survive weather effects.

Here's where it gets interesting: Instead of buying a "miner" unit or a "woodcutter" unit, you instead enter an editor where you make a machine out of individual parts. You need a place for a robot to attach to, and you can design the machine with different tools, mechanical parts, structural parts, weapons, armor, etc., and the resource cost of the machine is however much it would cost to create all the parts in the machine. These "machine profiles" are saved and can be made at any construction building.

The same goes for any kind of unit. They're all player-created.

Even more interesting: They're physics affected. They can be tossed around by external force, they can be damaged depending on where they hit and how hard. This means that if a war machine has a lot of armor on the front, they won't take as much damage from the front as they would on other sides.

EVEN MORE-ER INTERESTINGER: You can go to space. Anything can technically go into space, but because of the physics, you will need to design a rocket that can actually reach space and return safely.

You would need to create a mission control building and you could create missions that could be carried out on a schedule or a one time thing. The ship would carry it out (Think MechJeb from Kerbal Space Program, it's the same idea.)

IN ADDITION: It's a persistent MMO with lots of solar systems and planets that players can be on.

Would the Unity Game Engine be capable of something like this? I know that Kerbal Space Program was made in Unity, so the physics-affected custom vehicle part is possible, but I don't know if something of this scale would be feasible.

Hm. Sounds cool, but I just get the feeling that as an MMO, it would quickly be dominated by players who build things to be effective.

Once advanced players figure out how to design things for maximum effect at minimum cost, certain players will take a decisive advantage.

Here's the thing though: because the machines are player-built, no design will be best at everything. Let's say one person designs a machine that has TONS of frontal armor and powerful guns, and he has it line up in formation. Someone could counter this by designing a machine that is faster and could flank their formations and attack from the back/sides/top/bottom.

If someone made a machine that is completely covered in armor so that only the engines are poking out, they won't be able to make very many because of how expensive it would be to create. In addition, they would be ridiculously heavy and would require a lot of fuel to get into orbit (unless they were constructed in orbit), and would have horrible acceleration because of how much delta-V they would need to do anything.

Yes, but say a player manages to design something that has no real weaknesses at the expense of not really having any strengths, either.

The only effective counter to that is a specialist of some sort, and if you mess up ordering one of those around, they can be killed easily.

Obviously yes, there is the problem of somebody potentially creating something that is simply too hard to kill.

At the same time though, in order to make something stronger, you have to either give it more physical armor or give it energy shields, both of which would end up requiring the vehicle to use more energy, either in the form of powering shield generators or creating more thrust.

So yes, a better-resourced player will be stronger than one who has just joined, but that's always a problem.

Although, one way to help with that could be by keeping new players secret by not announcing their presence and by putting them on a planet that is at least a certain distance away from other players.

New topic: There's always the problem of space being enormous. How will interstellar travel be carried out? I think that using jumpgates and wormholes would be best. You could load a ship up with the materials required to make a jump gate, send it through a wormhole, and make a jump gate on the other side.

I'm not saying anything about new players versus experienced ones, I'm thinking in terms of serious players versus casual ones.

Regular "casual" players would just design things to be "cool looking", but hardcore "serious" players would design their equipment to be practical and efficient. This might have the effect of reducing cost per unit, but would mostly alter the cost to effect ratio. Therefore, serious players at any experience level will have a decisive advantage over less serious players unless you find some way to balance things.

Then the hardcore players would complain about catering to casuals and start riots on internet forums… I'm thinking too hard.

You didn't think I thought of something similar already, sting? :)

MEH

Nothing can be a truly original idea anymore, everything's been thought up already. This is just an idea I thought up and I want to do it :P

Oh, I see what you mean. That's something that can't really be avoided. This game IS going to more of a "hardcore" game, though. It could be played more casually, but the people who play casually obviously won't do as well as the people who play to win.

But that's the thing. No one ever really "wins" in an MMO. Not unless you put in PVE quest lines. And if you add those, are those PVE quests going to be one time things so that once you complete one, you can never do a given quest again?

Otherwise, I guess you could have scoreboards for how long it takes to finish a given quest, how many enemies were killed, how much in resources you collected on that quest, etc. etc. But even there, hardcore players who design and select their equipment for maximum effect at minimum cost will generally have the advantage.

And besides that, even with PVE quests, you'll still likely have a PVP component. So how do you prevent "casual" players from getting curb stomped by "u83r 1337" hardcore players?

Can we make this into a general "Video Game Idea" topic?

I have one I'd really like to flesh out.

I think of "winning" in a competitive sandbox game as being the most powerful person around. Because of this, I gauge winning on a scale of who wins more than the other winners.

No, there won't be quests. It will all be player-made, except for the galaxy.

@ Manatee:

I like that idea, I'll contact a mod about it.

More about my game:

I think making it 2D would be pretty smart, for simplicity and performance. The planets would still be enormous and really, really far apart, they would just be 2D instead of 3D.

Opinions?

That still leaves the issue of how you're going to get new players into the game. If your game can't attract new players, it will slowly die off as old players get bored with it. Because to be honest, if new players are dropped into the same sandbox with everyone else, what's to stop a more experienced player from quickly stomping the newcomer into the dirt?

Distance.

The new players would spawn on planets that are at least X distance away from other planets that older players have colonised or regularly visit.

EDIT:

Expanding on the system of keeping newbies from getting stomped by oldies:

I think that having a sort of universal "power scale" that all players fall under would be a good idea. This would take into account how long they have been playing, how many planetary bodies or moons they have discovered, how many bodies they have colonised, etc. It would also track certain milestones/achievements, such as their robot population and whether they've made vehicles or gotten into a stable orbit. Things like that.

The game would take things like this into account.

If 2 players joined at about the same time, then they could be put on the same planet.

If one player has only just figured out how to get into orbit, then a new player could be put on another planet in their same solar system.

If a player has colonised a planet or moon, then a new player would be put outside of their solar system.

If a veteran has interplanetary battleships and owns several adjacent solar systems, all of which have orbiting rings of solar-powered interceptors, and has converted all of his moons into enormous laser and missile platforms, then new players would be put as far away from him as possible without violating the other checks.

Eventually you'll end up having to generate entirely new planets so that new players can get the hang of the game. That takes up memory. I know that doesn't seem so bad, but remember that the terrain is retained on your end.

So as new players join, you'll need more and more memory to support all the planets, won't you?

I edited my post to elaborate on the system more.

Yes, there will need to be quite a bit of hard drive space.

Remember though, that empty space wouldn't really take storage space. The only things that would take up a significant amount of space would be the planets, and in theory not even those would be that large storage-wise.

Taking into account that there are thousands of planets, of course, does make it larger, but the game should be able to pay for the electricity and the hardware. It would probably require a monthly fee. I would love to make it free to play, but I'm not sure how I could do that and still bring in money (apart from advertisements on the website) without making it pay to win.

Remember that the galaxy would be larger than the EvE Online galaxy, and wouldn't have warp drives as easily usable. Warp drives would be immensely expensive to use unless you were extremely advanced. Most interplanetary travel would be achieved by sending a single warp-capable construction ship to go build a jump gate, then using that to send things through. The warp gates wouldn't be cheap either, as they would have to be bigger than the ships they are sending, and would require large amounts of energy.

Okay, now it's starting to fall into place.

I think I get it now.

lol I edited my post again right before you replied. I really need to do a better job of making sure I have everything I want to say in the post before I post it >_>

Don't hit the post button so fast, then.

Well the problem is that I post it, then right after I start to go to another page, I realize something else I should say.

but yes, I'll stop and read over it more than once before I post it from now on >.<

To try to clarify about new player placement:

Let's imagine the first 2 players, A and B, join. Player B joined about a half hour after player A. The game decides that, since they both joined at the same time, they will be placed on the same planet in order to allow them to interact right off the bat.

About 2 hours later, after players A and B have built towns and are just starting up their metal production for building more robots, player C joins. The spawning algorithm decides "Well, these two players here would easily wipe this other guy out. I'll put player C on the planet next to the player A and B planet." Player C is then placed on that planet alone and plays the game.

Players A, B, and C eventually reach the point where they can communicate with each other through radio sattelites. Shortly after this, player D joins. The game thinks "Players A, B, and C have built spacecraft and have them in orbit. They aren't far from being able to travel through space. I'll put player D outside of their solar system so that they can't just wipe out player D before he has a chance to defend."

So on and so forth, with new players spawning further and further away from people the more advanced they are.

Alright, last time I'm bumping this, since it was changed to "game ideas general" and I want to make sure people know to post here about their game ideas.

Video Related:

As for a game Idea, In perfect dark there's a mode where player 2 can control a NPC in the campaign and has the kill the player 1 controling the main character, and because NPCs in the game are usually very weak compere to the main character; player 2 takes control of a different npc when the one he controls gets killed.

I'm thinking of the Team FPS Game where one of the Teams is weaker but has NPCs by their side and the players switch from character to character as they get killed, but the other team can't respawn.

In response to the video:

I feel that my game circumvents some of the problems in a few different ways, one of which being the fact that there are no "units" you buy using resources (apart from the little basic robots). Everything is player-designed.

Combined with how it's all physics-affected. this means that a better-armored vehicle will be heavier, which means more energy is required to keep it moving. More weaponry adds to the weight, even stronger engines and bigger fuel tanks will add to the weight. There really isn't any "I win" unit in my game because it's realistically limited.

In addition, something I forgot to mention before is that the world is persistent. When you log out, your little robots keep going. On a basic level, they can take care of themselves; They can get food and water, they can run away from wild animals or fight back if they need to, and they will try to stay near each other.

This next part is a new idea: To keep the more advanced things going, a "central mind unit" can be created and attached to a radio transmitter, which you can create profiles in. You can schedule jobs and in these profiles, such as "the machines named 'woodcutter' have to keep cutting wood. the machines called 'miner' need to dig to this depth and dig around for resources." and so on and so forth. Everything within range of the radio transmission will be subject to its commands and will follow them out the best they can.

The range can be extended by other central mind units by bouncing the radio transmission off of other radio structures.

For example, you have a city on the planet with a central mind unit attached to a radio transmitter. You also have a satellite in orbit with a radio transmitter. You can bounce the commands off of the satellite to have them sent to another part of the planet, or maybe to a moon or another satellite.

Note: The radio waves wouldn't really be a fully-simulated radio waves. the game would just check for line of sight to something that is able to recieve radio and would send it to it.

About the game you mentioned: That is actually an interesting idea. I would guess that you can sort of hide in the crowd and try to attack at just the right time?

I thought it was only forum games, but since I'm here…
I want to become an animator and a videogame designer before I die. So far, I have got this idea for an iPad game.

In the year 2112, you wake up in a hospital (the character is never seen, because it's a First person adventure game, and you choose his/her name), you can't remember anything that happened before you lost all sense. Someone (Maybe an officer or something like that) explains that you were found in the shore of this city (Random futuristic city name), and that you can't remember anything because the pollution in this future is so deadly or something like that. You are given a small house to live for the time being, but you have to work to pay for electricity and food. You can go and search around for jobs and ways to make money, but you may also encounter thiefs who won't hestitate to kill you for money. The main goal for the game is to save enough money so you can leave that horrible city, and to find out about your past before you were found in the shores.

I want it to be something like Total Distortion (which you probley never heard of) where you complete these minigames to open doors and puzzles and stuff. And you have this dialogue box, so you can answer differents kinds of stuff. But the battle system might be a problem, because I don't want it to be with guns or stuff like that. (I also want the battle system to be something like the guitar battles in Total Distortion, but with more variety)

If you aprove dis idea, good. If not, I don't really care, because I will try to make this game as long as I live.

Also, check out Total Distortion. It's a little short, but there's just so much ways to have fun, and it has awesome music, including the best game over song.

I while ago, I had an idea for a video game…..
…then I watched a movie called, "Total Recall"

My game was going to involve a human set in the future, whose memories are from another man's. You would go throughout the game collecting paper from a diary you wrote when you were describing the war that was happening in your time. The diary has special secrets in it, reveling your wife, children, and other various memories. When you have recovered all the paper, you'll end up in a warehouse. You would then have a battle with the person who has your thoughts. You'll eventually win, discovering the last, and most important secret……

I stopped storming up the game their when I watched the movie.

My heart broke into millions of tiny pieces, thinking that something I had been working on for a while, had already been made.

That actually sounds kind of interesting. So the game revolves around trying to remember your past?

@ Nikolai

Darn :/

That's all I can really say.

Darn.

My idea is a co-operative FPS where you open gateways. Like, giant doors. Behind each door is a wave of enemies that you have to defeat. Your goal is to keep the gate open long enough to get through and face the next wave.

Like a lot of these types of games, there would be classes. Some would be able to keep gates open longer than others. I have a feeling something like a Scout or a mid-range class would be best, because I don't want to give heavy classes too much of an advantage.

The general theme is sort of a mix between Steampunk and a fantasy world kind of like World of Warcraft. Instead of Medics, there would be White Magicians, and stuff like that.

For a versus mode, I thought of just having the same gate opening principle, except the goal this time would be to get AI-controlled people through your gate, and the first to get 100 (as well as all the team members) would win. I haven't thought out that one much yet, but the main focus is Co-op anyway.

That's actually quite interesting. Puts a nice spin on the horde survive type of game.

In other news:

My game idea is going to become a reality! My brother, who's gamertag is Zeig_101, is doing the graphics design part of it (because I'm no good at it >_>) and we're both taking Java courses this year in school!

\o/

Not like ALL your past, but just what happened before you were found. It's a First Person Adventure game, where you never actually see the main character, because it's supposed to be YOU. But eventually you find out that you are the survivor of a recent plane crash, and you were going to this Dream City after saving up a lot of money. After you realize about this, you need to show proof that you paid for that, so the goverment (or insurance company or something like that) gives you a ticket to the city of your dreams (because they suck so much, that they don't record passengers in flights). Then you find out that this other guy is trying to steal your identity, so he can go to the dream city; and he will not hestitate to kill you.

I wonder how a FPS White Mage would look like. Do you have guns too?

There would probably be guns, but I don't imagine them like real life guns. They would most likely shoot some kind of magic. They'd also probably be very Steampunky, so there would be a lot of cogs and pistons.

My game would be a hybrid FP/TPS, but with heavy emphasis on customization; think Battlefield mixed with Blacklight. Note that this post is really long.

Pre-emptive tl;dr: Read it if you're interested.

The viewpoint could be switched between first-person and third-person, with not much difference between the two other than the actual view.

A lot of different settings would be tunable; though you do have the standard difficulty levels with preset settings, there would also be a "Custom" level which allows you to review the various elements of gameplay and tweak or switch them off, then figures out how difficult the game will be based on that.

There is a very, very heavy element of customization for both the player and the firearms he wields; I think of it as sort of like Gunsmith from Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, only with a heavier emphasis on customization for the firearms, where you snap attachments like supressors, scopes, and extended magazines onto the gun to provide various bonuses or different playstyles. Customization means you could pick the specific type of grip or red dot sight you think looks coolest. You could also change the weapon's base stats by switching out different barrels or stocks, and then you can personalize the firearm by painting it; this can be as simple as putting CADPAT forest camo onto it, to as advanced as putting line art or using a free-brush.

The people are also very, very customizable, with varying armor and underclothes selectable, all of which can have their paintjobs selected from preset or custom-made. Nothing is stopping you from running into battle in a stripperiffic outfit; that being said, wearing skimpy clothes means that you don't have armor and that translates to being cut down very, very quickly, which means wearing armor makes it easier on you. Armor works simply; heavier armor absorbs more damage but reduces your mobility.

Same goes for vehicles; what you are driving/flying can have different paintjobs or weapons. For example, the weapon on top of a tank could be an automatic grenade launcher (high damage, but slow fire rate), a minigun (doesn't do much damage but tears environment up with high rate of fire), or a Browning machine-gun (a go-between). You can also customize armor, which has varying effects; higher armor makes you slower, but more resilient to dying.

The actual gameplay is rather simple for an FPS. Iron sights are a requirement to use, but enforced in a different way; weapons are near-perfectly accurate, with no spread as in Call of Duty; however, the closest you get to a hipfire crosshair is a stream of light going from the barrel that marks where the bullet hits, movement makes the gun sway, which makes the stream and thus the impact point sway, and that means it's often better to use the iron sights for more precision targeting (not to mention that beyond the Easy default setting you don't even get that). Of course, crosshairs and leaf sights are available for weapons that can't sight in otherwise. There is bullet drop and Battlefield-style supression, and health… well, the exact level and how fast or if it regenerates is one of the things that can be specified.

Team-mates are also present, and actually intelligent; in addition, they have different commands depending on what you equip them with (i.e. people with machine guns can be ordered to supress, people with grenade launchers or mortars can be ordered to shell an area). Of course, teamies can also be replaced with friends in co-op.

The preset difficulties have different styles of play and are geared towards different people;

Training – Sort of a Call of Duty experience. You have a lot of health (average 5.56 assault rifle kills in 20 hits), which regenerates six seconds after being successfully hit by enemies. Hipfire bullet-line is present, and enemies are rather simplistic in AI. If you go down, you can pull out a sidearm and shoot back at enemies with the ability to shoot yourself back up.
Posting – A Battlefield-esque experience. You have the health of a multiplayer CoD player (5.56 AR kills in 6 hits), which only begins regenerating after fifteen seconds of not being hit or supressed. Your precious bullet-line goes bye-bye and enemies get a fair bit smarter. You are unable to shoot yourself back up when you're down, but you can still be healed by allies or get up if you aren't hit for about 30 seconds. Enemies are also a fair bit more intelligent, able to act smartly on their own.
Battle – A challenging, more realistic experience. You now have the health of a multiplayer Battlefield 3 player (5.56 AR kills in 3 hits), and health has limited and very slow regeneration; you can only regenerate 25 HP sections of your health bar, and you have to use healing items scattered about to heal yourself for the most part. You cannot get back up after going down and must be healed by an ally. Enemies can now act smart both alone and in groups.
Special Operation – For the sadomasochists who play ArmA. You can die in one or two hits from any firearm, and health doesn't regenerate; big enough impacts can drain health over time unless healing items are used. If you go down, you are unable to shoot back and must wait for an ally to revive you, and if they don't do so fast, you die.

Multiplayer plays mostly like Battle, only with Posting's health regen rules and Spec Op's rules for going down, though you can tweak settings as they go. The modes center around Deathmatch (get x number of kills as a team or alone), Conquest (think along the lines of Battlefield), and Objective (which involves getting item A, which can be anything from a bomb to a VIP, to area B, which could be a pick-up point or a reactor). Killstreaks would work on a time-unlock system and would be requested instead of immediately deployed; players who have massively fallen behind have a near-100% chance of getting something called in, whereas someone leading the pack would have trouble getting anything beyond a UAV equipped with radar called in due to their excellent performance. In addition, there would be less killstreaks due to the fact air vehicles are pilotable.

Finally, there is a class system, but it's more loose than anything else; Pointmen have no equipment but move faster and are intended to run distractions; Medics carry gear to heal and revive team-mates, and get innate health regeneration, Supports carry more ammo than base, can restore ammo, and are intended to keep enemies down under constant barrages of gunfire; and Pilots are intended to drive vehicles, and can regenerate vehicle armor as well as move faster and get more armor (though Pilots can still shoot people and the other classes can still drive). There are no weapon restrictions; besides gear, any type of gun can be carried by any class.

Alternatively, if that was too much for you; Star Wars: Battlefront III, because who doesn't want that?

We need more Lovecraftian horror games.

Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth didn't count. That is all.

Well said my friend….
…well said…

Well, Zeig_101 and I have made some sprites for our game. Anyone interested in seeing them?

Here's a simple idea: a Timing Based Roguelike.

Like, there would be moving walls that could crush you that wouldn't move in turn with your turns. Or platforms that rotate. Or enemies that you can only hit when they're not jumping/hiding/whatever.

Mostly, the selling point would be bullets. You could have a bow-and-arrow that could create "combos" by hitting multiple enemies in a line. And also some enemies could probably shoot bullets too.

It's nothing too fresh, but I don't think I've seen anything that's done it before.

I don't quite understand this idea. Care to elaborate?

I'm guessing you don't know what a Roguelike is. I'll explain.
Roguelikes are RPGs characterized by randomly generated maps and turn based movement. In other words, as soon as you move on the map, your enemy moves. He does NOT move, however, without you first taking a turn. Also, all attacks are pretty much done on the map, not in a separate combat screen.

Wikipedia gives some good examples of what one is like.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is one, and a pretty good one at that. (I remember some people bashing it on this forum, but I happen to like it.) It's what inspired this game idea.

But now, imagine that not everything is bound to your movement. Thing like pistons that would come out of the walls and try to crush you, or push you away from the particular square your standing on. Rotating squares that would only let you out in their set direction. Monsters that would jump at certain intervals, and you could only hit them while they're on the ground.

Most importantly, projectiles like arrows or bullets would continue on straight paths even when you're not moving. They could hit enemies that form big lines. Stuff like that.

They're really just supposed to be ways to make the Roguelike and its "boring" system more actiony.

Should I make some diagrams? I feel like this will be one of those times where pictures would explain it better.

Oh, I am completely aware as to what a Roquelike is. Dwarf Fortress, anyone?

What I don't understand is your idea of making stuff happen outside the turns. I don't understand that.

Take my "enemy jumping" idea.
He jumps in place to a kind of rhythm. He's not moving to another space, he's just jumping. But when he's in the middle of a jump, he can't be attacked.

… Now that I'm thinking about it, that particular instance is more of an annoyance than a gameplay element. But I don't think this idea was particularly bright to begin with.

Rotating platforms. Think of them like one way gates. They spin your position around when you stand on them, even when you're not moving. So, you have to time your moves to get out the way you want to go.

Enemies don't skip taking turns after you. It's just that the environment and some objects can change while you're standing in place, therefore making you have to time some of your movements instead of going at your own pace.

I feel like I would need an actual gameplay demo to demonstrate this. This is far tougher to explain than I thought. It's such a crystal clear idea in my head…

Oh, I see what you mean now. The terrain, mostly, is what moves outside of turns. You and the enemies still move on a turn-by-turn basis.

Hey, is VBasic any useful in games? I'm learning it this year because it's a prerequisite for java courses.

What about…an orange in a maze that eats Pac-Mans?

I want a detailed remake of SimEarth on a multi-planetary scale. Perhaps simulating a small solar system with at least four terrestrial planets. It should also include a geopolitical simulator for intelligent life forms, once they evolve.

My game will do that to a certain extent, but it's 2D and the players will be interacting instead of AI's

I've come to a bit of an impasse…

Zeig and I have decided that the planets/moons/terrain of large bodies will be made up of voxels, which each pixel being a voxel.

On a side note, we've decided to shrink the universe's size down to 1/16th, both for performance and gameplay reasons. It would be way to slow if it took 70 hours to do a lunar orbital insertion on an earth-like planet and moon.

Anyways, back on track: The problem that voxel terrain presents is that we can't figure out how to make the planets rotate and orbit. Something I think may work is having coordinate systems nested inside each other.

Imagine this: There is a solar system with a planet orbiting it. This planet also has a moon orbiting it. The solar system has the center of the sun at (0,0) on a coordinate plane. The planet moves on a rail through the solar system plane.

When one of your ships is flying through the solar system on a mission to reach this planet, it is also in the suns coordinate plane and is only affected by the gravity from the sun. However, when it reaches the planet's gravitational sphere of influence (gets close enough), the ship transitions into a new coordinate plane with the center of the planet at (0,0).

The planet is still orbiting around the sun on the solar system coordinate plane, and the ship is orbiting the planet on the planetary coordinate plane. The voxels of the planet are also on the planetary coordinate plane.

Essentially, you're loaded into a different world when you get close enough to a planet. How does this sound?

…Wow. Some of the game ideas in this thread are totally awesome, and I'd love to see them made.

…Subscribed. Keep the good ideas coming.

Okay, Zeig and I are putting our idea on hold for now to make a smaller, less ambitious progress to make some money and get a little bit of a name for ourselves.

We're making a horror game in Unity and will try to make it very good. It will play on peoples fears of the inevitable, knowing that something will happen, but being powerless to do anything worthwhile to stop or hinder it. You are worthless, and you refuse let yourself believe so, despite your inability to prove otherwise.

This will be good if we pull it off right.

It will need hats, no matter what.