Game Proposal

Since my workhorse computer is down, I thought it would be fun to share a game proposal or thought.  I do not have a word processor at the moment, so there may be skads of spelling errors.  Prepare yourself.

There are a variety of game play styles that I really gravitate towards.
Minefract for its terraforming and survival.
RTS games for the resource gathering and construction.  Ie. Age of Empires.
Black and White because in the original you interacted with your people and they interacted with you, despite being a god in the game your weren't a silent god like in other RTS games.
Civilization because you are always looking for that optimal lucky resource smattering in the initial part of the game and spend the rest of the game exploiting it.

What if we merged all three.  Procedurally generate a voxel based world that spawns with resources.  Land upon its shores with a small parcel of villagers that you could then assign roles to.  Roles such as getting pregnant, foraging, farming, logging, mining, defending the camp, etc.  The goal of the game of course is to find a suitable place to live and turn it into a nice little empire perhaps even as far as making a walled in fortress.  With terraforming options that voxel provides the options are really quite endless.  Add to that terraforming with the construction of structures that produce upgrade trees such as typical RTS games.  The twist is two fold, firstly the game is played in the first person, and secondly the world you are managing is doing most of the heavy lifting for you.  In the early game it is important for the player to collect some of the resources as the village grows there are more people that can be delegated to.

The crown jewel of such a game would be a procedural AI, what would stop someone from creating something similar to the radiant AI of the Elder Scrolls Franchise?  Ultimately role assigned can dictate many behaviors add to that the basic need shown by games such as tilted mill and the options really are quite unique.

Ultimately this leads to a second gameplay dynamic.  The option of multiplayer is immense because you have this island with resources and the option to create.  We as RTS players love to build our base so that we can destroy the base of someone else.  However, as we have found that in Black and White 2, when RTS elements invaded the game the results were very poor.  The goal then becomes a few things.  Firstly, the upkeep of units must be very steep.  For instance soldiers could require a ton of resources to maintain such as wood, food, and iron.  This requirement boils down to food, of all things because to support people to produce the other things there needs to be tons of crop space and people tending the fields.  The primary resource then ultimately becomes land for fields.  On an island, expansion is limited, and keeping a pop cap low makes it so that there is no loading screen and limited latency.

As a first person game, the graphics need to be more than Black and White, but they can be stylized as to have less of a foot print.  In the end, even minecraft lags like a champ sometimes.  Anyway, that is my rant for the day... time to go to the dentist.

Cheers