Back to good ol' traditional, long-winded game ideas this week. This one is another experiment in combining RPG features with a separate genre that rarely, if ever, employs them.
Set a moderate amount of time into the future (wow, how non-committal) and mankind is exploring the galaxy with faster than light travel. Which is possible in the future. But it wasn't an easy ride to get from light speed to faster than light speed, and we kind of goofed up a few times along the way with mad scientist-esque techniques involving powering through alternate dimensions and creating warps in the fragile space-time continuum. As such, there remains many, many minute tears and anomalies throughout the explored universe from that turbulent time. Occasionally, these tears manifest themselves as dangerous portals to universes we'd rather not have any encounters with. Which is where you come in.
You lead a squadron of starfighters, specially-shielded from the bizarre energy signals and various cosmic radiations created by these fabric tears, whose task it is to reconnoiter these rambunctious irregularities and find a way to close and/or repair them before too much undesirable alternate-dimension "warp-product" finds itself in our galaxy. This generally involves travelling to the anomaly as a group, defeating all the elements that managed to escape, heading inside and splitting up into two teams: one to fix the tear from the inside with some kind of laser (I guess) and the other to defend the repair team from outside interference from that universe's usually hostile (but not always) natives. Once the tear has been repaired sufficiently enough, it starts repairing itself on its own and this is your cue to get out of there. After which, you need to eliminate all the entities that escaped into our universe during the mission.
Gameplay-wise, I want it to be one of those old-school PC space-sims where it's all in first-person. I expect the various alternate universes and their inhabitants to be as bizarre and unsettling as possible, and this effect would be exponentially increased if you were seeing it all first person from your miniscule starcraft. As well as the usual hell dimensions, pink whirly dimensions, eldritch elder alien dimensions and "everything is the same but evil and with moustaches" dimensions, I also want to occasionally go all the way to crazytown. Like one dimension is a colossal recreation of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, where Chairy is several thousand miles tall and Globey is actually the size of a planet. Or another dimension is made out of chocolate, with chocolate starships and starfighters. Big mystery with that universe is how their ships can use a propulsion system that won't melt them.
I mentioned RPG elements, so I'd better deliver. Basically, we're following the "make money to spend on improvements" system, which can increase your fire power, shielding, and also buy various luxuries like a fuel funneller (to refuel your ship on the cheap using natural sources like suns or whatever weird energy things the alterno-verses use) and a tractor beam. The tractor beam opens up a secondary means to earn money: collecting souvenirs. Rare altero-verses items can fetch high prices with collectors, though poaching these items are generally looked down upon by the various space authorities out there, what with their desire to close these things as quickly as possible to stop their content leaking into our own. But then you have to pay for these upgrades somehow. As your department gets better equipped and gains more renown, more pilots (far better ones than the "darn it, they're trying"-level volunteers you start with) will ask to join you. You'll eventually start getting famous explorers, bounty hunters and even space pirates of the universe accompanying your team to help out, some with their own specially-equipped starfighters. Find the best combination to use when heading out to a new anomaly.
