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Utility Locator Simulator.
You know those "Call 811 before you dig!" signs? (Or, where I grew up, call JULIE?)
In the real world, underground utilities are generally found by utility locators using tools that detect current running through either a metal pipe or wires, or through a tracer wire if the pipe isn't iron/steel. Utility locators do tickets called into 811, and go about neighborhoods (both city and rural) marking with paint on the ground where gas/electric/fiber/sewer/water/etc. utilities are, prior to construction where digging will happen.
I feel like it'd be really fun to simulate someone using one of the detectors and having to go to some street location, find the utility pedestals or hookups to homes or businesses, and trace the lines and paint where they go.
You could base it in real science like a lot of simulators out there, too. There's different techniques and frequencies you can use to detect underground utility lines, and different ways they can interfere with one another so that things go wrong and your markings are off.
And the whole process of locating utilities could be very, very gamified. You could get a score on how well you marked them, and terrible things could happen if you were wrong.
Like, maybe you marked a gas line incorrectly, so the next contractor to dig hits it and gets blown sky high when things explode. Or maybe an office building/school/whatever had to be emergency evacuated because your poor marking caused a gas leak when construction started.
Or maybe you located the cable fiber to 200 homes in a neighborhood wrong, and an excavator cut it, and suddenly all those homes can't watch the Superbowl and the "happiness" of the neighborhood goes down.
Or you located a water or sewer line wrong, and suddenly someone's back yard is filled with water/sewage and little Timmy gets sick and dies because his wading pool is full of poo.
And you could get things to level up, too. Like, if you do good work and move to a better utility locator company, maybe they issue you a can of wasp spray.
Or perhaps you befriend a beekeeper and they can come out and remove a swarm off of your utility pedestal so you don't get stung to death, and you can save the bees instead of killing them. Get an Environmentally Friendly badge achievement or something.
Or you raise relationships with the construction contractors so they mark their locator tickets better so your job is easier. (Or you piss them all off, and they tell you to mark ALL utilities for three high-traffic blocks...when the only digging they're doing is a single stump in someone's back yard, far away from the horrible convoluted intersections you were forced to mark.) Or maybe homeowners like you, so they stop surrounding "ugly" utility pedestals on their properties with rose bushes so you don't have to crawl through thorns to get to it.
I think it could be very fun, and also kinda raise awareness of what utility locators do and why.
I never expected to find the idea of a game based on finding utilities underground to be exciting but you did it. I'm in.
If only I had the time to learn game programming. And art, and music, and...basically everything.
I could be rich!
Lmao this is hilarious. You could also throw in kids from the neighborhood stealing the little red flags 🚩 that are left in the ground for marking digs
A few things to remember to add:
- False positives
- Abandoned utilities
- Utility maps and GPS coords that were never made, were never updated, or are flat out wrong
- Contractors who will make every excuse and lie about what happened
- Random people asking if your digging for gold and worried if you're going to tear up their lawn
Yeah, reading about these things are what made me realize how layered the game could be.
You could have a lying contractor who kicked dirt over your marks, and whether you would get the blame or not would depend on screenshots you took of your work beforehand XD
From a technical perspective, I bet programming abandoned utilities and how those impact detection would be a challenge for the programmers interested in the "simulation" part. I bet there's some math going on there!
This is a genuinely great idea. I've been playing Dave the Diver and I can see this having a similar level of management, slowly introducing you to the new roles - first you're just marking, and over time you're managing more and more of the whole process and earning money on the way.
Heaps of room for cool visuals like revealing the pipes you find, cutscenes showing work done/completed.
Love it! 100% would play this.