Indie budget game you'd make if you could

[Blaine]

Driving/Survival/exploration/RPG in Sci-Fi setting, where you drive a futuristic truck camper, through a dark ice-age landscape of a parallel universe future Earth. The sun is misteriously missing, small spots of living humans are tucked in sparse underground self sustained small arcologies. The only way to survive on the surface is to use these "trucks". Exploration through the abandoned ruins by foot is possible but only for limited ranges.

We have this already in real life. It's called Los Angeles.

 

[Corvinus]

One of you brethren should make the spiritual successor to this. A true work of art, and a boundless provider of astute social commentary.

 

[Dedicated_Dark]

Game would look like Daggerfall, be immersive like Gothic, adventurous like Morrowind & play like Deus Ex.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Game would look like Daggerfall, be immersive like Gothic, adventurous like Morrowind & play like Deus Ex.

Pac Man?

 

[Galdred]

Imagine you can make games.

Please describe what are the titles that you'd make on a budget of $30-50k, i.e. games like Serpent in the Staglands, Age of Decadence, etc.

You can use existing games and say what you'd improve. You can mash two or three existing games into one. Go wild.

If you go over budget with your description, I'll tell you.

Actually, 50K has been roughly my expenses so far (more or less), excluding my own time obviously. It can pay for :
10K: 2 isometric tilesets and props(ie biomes)
5K: 2 animated non humanoid characters
30K: humanoid character template wirth a lot of permutable parts (weapons, greaves, breastplate, helmet, ...)
3K: UI stuff
2k: corporate stuff I had to pay (but wouldn't have to if I had waited longer to create the company)
1k: several packs of sound effects
I didn't pay for the music (the composer will get a cut), nor for the marketing/PR stuff (it can be done by yourself, or gamedesigner/idea guy if you decided to team up with one). It would be 5-10K for 1h roughly (if you try to find "cheap" composers)
Trailer related stuff would be roughly 5k if you don't want to do it yourself.

50K is tight, but sufficient to get some good quality assets at the cost of variety.

That would be too tight for an IE game.
Sirkuit: Birhtright could be doable (it was one of the project I was thinking about when I started), if you reuse the same assets on the tactical and RPG layers. But in order to make it work, units would have to be heavily stylized. Something like 3 dudes, or hero + 2 dudes on a hex.

i have some intriguing ideas i'd like to explore with a sci-fi mount & blade, easily tweakable to be at the same time single player, multi, moba, last man standing or whatever else you could want from a fps.

Mount and Blade had both the coder and the artist work for free! I don't think the art would fit in 50K at all if you had to contract it.