Game Design: An Impromptu Proposal

I tend to post a lot of my ideas here, and there has been a game that I have wanted to make for about a decade.  If the job climate continues as it has, then I shall probably have plenty of time to work on one.  So let us start with the "way back when" speech.

Way Back When: I was a young man playing something called MUDs, for you youngins that stands for Multi User Dungeon and the games were made entirely in text environments.  In a way, this was quite freeing as there were no art assets to deal with other than creative GUI.  I had this idea to incorporate teamwork and zombie survival long before zombie games were in vogue.   Many games were RPG class based, so I thought we could have players choose professions and venture out of this underground makeshift city to get supplies to fuel the economy and survive.  This idea has morphed a little since technology has changed and the whole zombie thing has been done to death.

Right Now:  My current design proposal is a city builder, but in the guise of first person survival. The setting is nearly irrelevant because the basic things that you need to survive are always the same: food, water, shelter, fire, love.  Forcing a city builder which used to be "ideal block" based can now be changed in a similar way that Tilted Mill changed the genre by giving ai scripts to the individual settlers.  I would be proposing a method more closely associated with a game called Black and White, where roles were assigned to individual people like Breeding, Woodcutting, Farming, etc.  The goal would be that you, as a person, could spend your time harvesting resources in a minecraft esque way, until your meager band of people had grown into a larger self sufficient settlement.

My master plan has the game starting in a very perilous stone age scenario, slowly working toward a more stable iron age self sufficient mode.  I would then want the game to escalate into a more Dwarf Fortress scenario where more complicated and deadly things start to happen to make survival more than (hey nothing can kill us) to (hey we are killing ourselves).  I understand that this design proposal while only two paragraphs long implies TONS of working systems and is probably to much for me to implement all on my own.  For this reason, art may have to be sacrificed for the greater good.

Does anyone remember a game called Daggerfall?  In Daggerfall all the non villager NPCs were a 2 dimensional pixel art box with 2 or three animation stages that always faced the player.  If I were to make every sprite do the same with a Front and a Back phase for the player to see then I may be able to limit the amount of art assets that need to be created.  In the very least, it will ALWAYS look better than dwarf fortress.



Gameplay:

The player takes an active role in the game world in a variety of ways:
Managing Settler's Roles, Combat, Personally Acquiring Resources, Placing Buildings, Diplomacy and Scenario Resolution.