For a good while I have wanted to make a smulation game, and I have never managed to get past a certain very general notion of what I wanted to do. Yesterday, however, talking with the partner, we came up with an idea for one such game, and I thought it would at least be an interesting thought experiment to flesh it out, if only just a bit.
The basic idea is to make this a sort of "number go up" game, like the kinds of games one finds in the android play store which are just about growing a number exponentially. While some are presented in various guises, there are some in which one is simply presented a number and a few options of exponential functions, and a button to "upgrade" to the next order of magnitude, so to speak, to keep growing indefinitely.
There are two mechanics to this game, and both are idle and operate under the same principles, they are the earnings and inflation. Earnings are the total amount of money you make per unit of time, and for these we would have a very fanciful exponentially growing function. As in the game I mentioned earlier, the user is given an option to upgrade to an increasingly steeper function, which they would have to do manually to keep their numbers growing beyond their "idle" capacity (ie, if the user is not there to keep upgrading to higher orders of magnitude). The second mechanic is inflation, this one grows exponentially without any intervention. The task of the user, then, is to keep their earnings above the rate of inflation, or otherwise, inflation may surpass the user and eat up all of their accumulated wealth, leaving the user behind and in need to keep upgrading to ever faster growing functions to their earnings. Ideally, the user would spend close to 8 hours a day on their phone pressing a button to keep up with the rate of inflation and possibly keep their numbers near a level they feel comfortable with.
It doesn't seem like a very difficult simulation to make, I shall try to do it one of these days, now that I have more or less of an idea of what the overall mechanics are supposed to look like.