   Game idea/design wanted ..
  Hi guys,I'm after a game idea/design to demonstrate my engine.  I program games for a living, so something more meaty than your tetris/break-out clones is required.  Note: I am no good at thinking up game design ideas.....hence me asking :-)It needs to be minimal in terms of art assets.  Initially I started doing a top down shooter ( space marine on deserted spacestations ), and got quite far, but what it really needs is animations and things on the models ( currently it's a small sphere for the avatar, that kills wandering eyeballs ), as well as more complex scenery.  As I'm not an artist, it's kind of a no go.All the ideas I come up with are all too ambitious in terms of the art required, which I could not do myself, my max skills are basic.I'm kind of tempted to do a shootem up ( spaceship stylee ), as I could model a basic ship/ships and get that working..... I'm also tempted to do an rpg/dungeon crawl, although I cant see how to do that without loads of art/animation to make it good.My engine has most of the trimmings, input/sound/shader-based/max exporter etc..., so all those bases are more or less covered.I put this request in this forum as I'm not in need of someone to do any work, I want some game ideas and thought this forum would be better, although feel free to move/recommmend the move to the help wanted section.any help would be appreciated.  I would post some screenies of what I've currently got, but I dont have a website....can I embed screenshots in the thread??  and how do I do this?   
  Since most indie developers become developers for the sole purpose of expressing their own idea, I doubt you'll get a lot of great ideas here.Why not use other games for ideas? That's what the rest of us do.   ;  If the objective is to showcase your game engine, then the artwork is generally quite important; programmer art that looks awful and doesn't demonstrate the features of the engine doesn't impress anyone, however clever the underlying tech might be. For that reason, I'd recommend you find an artist who can produce models that will really show off your engine's features at their best, rather than trying to 'make do' with mediocre programmer art.;  This guy does his own graphics:http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.htmlThey are quite minimalistic but some of the games (like Torus Trooper) are still visually impressive nonetheless.   ;  As sandman said, you need good art to show off your engine MORE than you need a good idea for a game.You might find some free art you like, failing that there are some artists who sell their stuff, and it is sometimes of very good quality.My personal favorite is 3DRT