Because this will be probably be lengthy, I will, in what is probably not in line with my usual character, be typing in properly formatted, capitalized, and punctuation-marked sentences.
I've had an idea kicking around in my head for what would probably be my 'ultimate game.' You know, if I had free reign on designing what I wanted and had a virtually-unlimited budget, what I would create.
I think some of my biggest influences as far as how I view story, games, and how they relate are Shadow of the Colossus, Getter Robo, and No More Heroes. Shadow of the Colossus has a huge, wide-open world, and it story features minimal dialogue and minimal non-player-controlled actions. There's much... I'm not sure how to put it, but I guess weight, put into your actions. It's just you against some powerful foes far beyond your normal reckoning. Getter Robo gave me a love of the nature of interactions between man and machine, and No More Heroes for a sort of surreal, (for lack of a better phrase) fucked-up feeling to the story, where you really can't tell where it's gone and you're honestly a bit scared to see where it will go. So, with "my ideal game," I think I'd like to have a sort of post-apocalyptic, wide-open desert world, with a "silent protagonist". I also like sort of simplistic, faceless designs for characters (such as Isaac from Dead Space; showing some ideas here). I also generally think the most interesting kinds of combat involve movement that's... again, not sure how to describe this, again, but I guess "intimately around" the body of the opponent (as some examples, the fact that you literally crawl around the bodies of Colossi, or like if some big guy tried to swing at you and you ducked and crawled/slid under his legs, or jumped on top of and stood on his arm).
I imagine exploring some kind of post-apocalyptic desert world as some lone guy with a giant robot. I have really no clue how exactly the robot would look, except possibly as a mix of some of Go Nagai's designs (mostly Mazinkaiser and Shin Getter Robo), some Colossi, and possibly Greco-Roman architecture. I almost definetly would want the robot to look more like aged, decrepit, mysterious machinery than a cartoon-y metallic superhero. I also imagine the possibility of climbing out of the cockpit of the robot while it's still going, possibly to get people off of the robot, or to jump onto another, or something. Basically, really unusual methods of combat that don't involve two people standing equidistant and punching each other, like brick walls with boxing gloves popping out of them. That shit be boring~
I don't think the backstory behind the apocalypse that you are living after will be directly explained in game. The player will have to explore the world themselves and try to put together what evidence there is in order to learn what caused it all. So, it'd be pretty much entirely possible to go through the whole game without knowing what's gone on here.
Now to talk about what I would do, graphics-wise. Digital painting (some examples of which I've posted in the "awesome artwork topic") is definetly one of, if not my absolute, favorite styles of art, and I'm fascinated with the idea of being able to re-create that style in 3D. The closest I've probably seen to that is with that new Prince of Persia game on the PS3 and Xbox 360 (very pretty game, too~). But I'd like to try to take it a step further, and have everything look kind of like it's been painted by broad brushstrokes in real-time. I'm not sure of the level of feasibility of such a thing, or exactly how to achieve it (I imagine some graphical filters, powerful lighting engines with extremely custom methods of pixel-shading, and possibly animated textures, but that sounds like, for an entire game, it would take monstrous amounts of processing power, so, I don't really know), however.
As for music, ideally I know the 2 artists exactly who I would get if budget weren't a problem. Jun Seba and Masafumi Takada. Jun Seba is Nujabes (who I've probably linked some songs from before), and Masafumi Takada is the creator of the music for God Hand and No More Heroes.
Songs like this would probably be a majority of the soundtrack. However, I also am an enormous fan of jazz, especially kinetic, energetic, fast-paced jazz, so I think for more action-oriented parts of the game, or parts where you fight, I would like to have
some crazy-ass jazz like those 3 songs.
Of course, these are just vague ideas kicking around in my head. I'm only 17 (well, soon to be 18) and I'm not graduating from high school until I'm nearly 19, and I'd like to go to college, so it'd be a while before it'd even be possible under the best of circumstances for me to get a shot at making this kind of thing. Regardless, I imagine I'll keep working at the idea. Of course, I've only had the idea of making my magnum opus be related to futuristic giant robots since like a year and a half ago, and I originally was going to do a comic book (with a very different plot, setting, and tone than this). Considering the large amount of money this might require I imagine that realistically it'd only appear as a comic someday.
post-apocalyptic robots, my 'ultimate game'
. It's a great way to have a grayscale painting with a colorful variety of hues. 
