A game focused on terraforming! You'd start as like...a rich individual or a group of people in a company, with a choice of species, (possibly custom, possibly from a list) confined to one planet that just got the tech to relatively cheaply reach their moon/another planet/an iron-cored planetoid. And you'd have to set up a colony there, but you wouldn't be placing buildings or whatever, you'd be making biodomes/cave systems/whatever liveable. And then you'd be able to pick some tech or magic or magitech (you'd have options, each has upsides and downsides) to be able to terraform better. And then you'd get something like Spore's terraforming minigame, in that you'd have to place down terraforming stuff and plants and animals and the like, except less minigamy-you'd be able to, say, shade a hot planet with a ring, or add atmosphere, or whatever, and you'd make little eco-dots that'd spread-you'd pick species and make several ecodots with different species and they'd compete and grow or die out. After a bit you'd be able to go to other solar systems and terraform/colonize there, and then you'd be able to meet aliens (also there'd be an uplift mechanic). you'd be able to trade with the aliens. they'd all have different tech/magic/magitech specialties, not all would have FTL or even spaceflight, but even stone age aliens can be traded with-they have plants etc that can be used in terraforming, and you can help them along technologically/magically. eventually you'd meet aliens with incompatible biochemistries, and have to learn ecosystem balancing all over again-either making worlds that are a mix of biochemistries with GMOs to link them, shunning the aliens and having to compete, or learning how to balance alien ecosystems while terraforming worlds they own as gifts. if you sell them some of your lifeforms in return for some of theirs, they can try to help you terraform your worlds! sometimes they'd mess up hilariously. like covering a whole planet in mutant kudzu or kudzu-analogue, forcing to you to make an ecosystem with the primary producer being entirely mutant kudzus. ETA: Some species would have different challenges. For example, a herbivore player-species doesn't need many animals on their world, you can go minimalist and have your species be the main consumer and weird kudzus be the main producer...but a simple ecology is likely to result in upset colonists. Meanwhile, carnivores would need more planets, and a complex enough ecology to support large numbers of farmed animals. Fliers would need thicker air, or sometimes a thicker background magic field...but magic works partially by abstracting somewhat from reality, so if you have too much magic, things start to go wrong. That's also the main disadvantage of magic tools-while high-Cuil magic can terraform planets nothing else can, and endgame would have some challenge that requires magic, magitech, and tech all being used, magic has the potential for unique disasters. Especially since some abstractions could be sematic..."[player's ship] is a terraformer. [tool] is a terraformer. therefore [player's ship]=[tool]" and suddenly you lose at least one ship because it turned into a random tool. Or it could be categorical-"[lifeform] is made of carbon. carbon-14 is carbon. now [lifeform] is all carbon-14." congrats your chickens/cats/cows/fish/whatever all turned into radioactive diamonds. Meanwhile pure tech needs power and materials, and lots of them. Magitech's not as strong as pure magic nor as safe as pure tech, but can do things that neither of them can. incidentally you'd also be able to make ecodots on ships! those would be tougher, being maintained by crew, and would make running the ship cheaper, especially if you have an edible-heavy ship ecology.
I read the first paragraph and my brain helpfully shouted "sci-fi Dwarf Fortress" and I told it "that is an incredibly terrible idea and not what they mean" but now my brain won't shut up about sci-fi Dwarf Fortress. #unfortunately some of the flavor text is hidden in places that would be Fun to mod and thus would be difficult to change #but you could change a lot of it
That's not the point I would have picked as different; DF is much smaller-scale and requires a lot more micromanagement and has much less complex interaction with outside groups and areas. (And I know it's not like DF, it's just my brain started shouting that one paragraph in because my brain does that sort of thing sometimes. :::PPP)
Yeah, that too. Although I like the idea of all the rock types being relevant...especially since 'iron core' is already a relevant thing, since gravity in an iron-cored planetoid gets stronger as you approach the core, allowing for cave systems with livable gravity and atmosphere near the core, with an air-gradient as steep as Earth's leading out to space-with ground present all the way. You'd just have to hailstorm the caves with comets (for air and water), maybe brace them a bit, supply light, add a bit of soil, and you could get an ecosystem going-and you can expand the caves by mining, and sending anything valuable you find on a train up to the airless, low-gravity surface-easy for spaceships to take off from! You wouldn't have to worry about pressure seals or meteor punctures either-nothing is pressurized.
Oh yeah-magic ships would be able to be really small, but also have a small maximum size. Magitech FTL ships have a minimum size that overlaps with larger magic ships, and a maximum size overlapping smaller pure tech ships. Pure tech ships can either a, have no FTL, or b, be large enough that they can't go on a planet and must have smaller ships in them to bring things/people planetside. Pure magic ships cannot be self-sufficient, but they're fast and much cheaper than magitech or tech ships. You can make a magic ship out of things like wood, for example. Magitech ships need metals and so on, but can also use some cheaper materials like wood or stone, and can have ecodots on them allowing for reduced operating costs. Very large magitech ships-like, several kilometers long-can be totally self-sufficient, but then won't have as much cargo space. Pure tech ships must be built in space and need metals, ceramics, glass, and a few other things. However, they have a vast amount of cargo space, produce their own power with onboard reactors, and can relatively easily be made totally self-sufficient. Their massive size is largely due to having a particle accelerator onboard, required for their FTL. As a result they can have the biggest crew, the biggest cargo space (these can have multiple ecodots that are kept separate-you can transplant entire ecosystems with these!), the most space for self-sufficiency (easier than magitech!), space for smaller ships, and once running basically just need refuelling every so often. There's probably other balancing things too, so that beating the game requires a multispecies terraforming group, a mixture of all three ship types, and probably other things too. It'd help if I could figure out what beating the game would entail. Help here? (Random possibly useful tidbit: in the lore, magic comes from the infinite realm outside reality.)
I guess the obvious answer for an end state would be something like "you reach this many planets" or "you've comfortably settled this much territory/this far out" or "you reach this specific location," though I feel like you'd probably want a postgame free-play option as well (whether so people can keep messing with their existing collection of biospheres or with procedurally-generated planets, so they can keep expanding).
I thought of a better idea! eventually, after spending enough time in game and getting a minimum number of living worlds, upgrades in each path, and species-specific upgrades (like, x species has wings, upgrade a ship to make it better for winged people-the more compatible species on a ship, the better, and some species like humans will bond with anything and allow for some otherwise incompatible species to coexist), you'd start to find a Blight. the Blight slowly damages the ecosystem of living worlds near it, messes with the local Cuil level (always bringing it towards 8-once you're able to both defeat and move Blight, moving some to worlds with Cuil>8 can help cleanup efforts), and starts to make non-living worlds even more uninhabitable. Some new upgrades would unlock-things to help you fight the Blight. You'd start to be prompted to head further towards the Blight, where you'd find, sometimes, remmants of thriving worlds that you can save-some of them have weird looking, Cuil 8 creatures that wander around in a mockery of life. The closer you go to the center of the Blight, the less actual life you see, and the more Weird Magic Abominations you see. Eventually you'd find out that the Blight used to be people-they used magic, and consistently only magic, to make worlds habitable, frequently not caring about installing even mediocre eco-dots. Eventually, they got warped by massive overuse of magic, but they're still trying to spread, and still mimicking what they did in life. Endgame-true endgame-would be saving them. You'd have to research a lot of magitech, tech, and magic focused around reversing-not destroying, reversing-the Blight. You'd start to be able to de-Blight areas. Their homeworld is a few Cuils above the maximum any magic disaster you have access to can reach, and it's completely impossible to make your ships not constantly take damage from the extreme Cuil level. It's not even technically in the universe anymore. It constantly spawns warped versions of the creatures, magitech, etc there. Think Alternian Trolls, plus the worst of the Republican Party, except they're all zombies with a massive amount of Thaumcraft Warp and contagious unreality that tries to turn other solar systems into them.
Saving them would require you to focus on saving civilians first, and you can then either destroy the royal/theocratic/politician zombies things or try to save them, too. EDIT: So basically it'd slowly become a cosmic horror story...that you can reverse.
I want a multiplayer zombie apocalypse survival game but if you get bit by a zombie and you don't get an antidote in time or you don't get killed while you are infected, you turn into a zombie and your new aim is to attempt to kill and sabotage your friends/whoever you were playing with WITHOUT getting killed by them if you get killed, you respawn as a human all over again I want it to have, like, rounds or something sort of like....the players have to survive a week in-game if even one human lives at the end of the round: humans win if zombies successfully kill or turn all humans: zombies win
:D :D :D!!! .....admittedly the only reason I want that as a video game is definitely because I love sabotaging and killing my friends in video games and it's not a mechanic in enough of the kinds of games I like but like it's an interesting idea regardless of why I personally want it, I think
You could also do something similar with like. Werewolves. And then you could like...pick either a dog or a human, and if you die to a werewolf you become a werewolf, and if you die to a human or dog you can choose to become either a human or a dog?
Speaking of werewolves-a game in which this magical apocalypse happened, and so the world's huge and filled with monsters and the like and magic is suddenly A Thing...but that happened years ago, people are rebuilding and learning...and then a werewolf apocalypse happened. You can either start as a werewolf, with a bunch of quests that are like...'kill this', ending with a quest for somehow getting the antidote followed up by a quest chain to regain your mind, or start as a human, fighting off werewolves and eventually succumbing to lycanthropy but not before managing to get your hands on a little antidote. Result: you play as a sapient werewolf! And then you have another quest chain where you gain proper respawning and get to pick a class, before being able to meet with other low-level players. You'd be able to make towns and farms and stuff, or just fight the endless monsters, or a mix. NPC villagers wouldn't respawn, but quests are given out by classes of villagers, and they can repopulate. Repeatables would include one to make more antidote and either give hostile werewolves the antidote, or deliver it to the starting areas. You'd also get a lycanthropy vaccine which stops human villagers from ever becoming werewolves, meaning that theoretically you could have an all-human village. The more antidote given to the starting areas, the easier finding it for the beginner quests is!
I saw the roosterteeth guys play a hide and seek game in gmod once, someone could possibly use that as a base for zombie shenanigans
I think with a few more updates you're basically talking about Project Zomboid. Maybe not. But sort of.
not really, I don't think? it doesn't seem like Project Zomboid includes the "you can be turned into a zombie and now get to murder/sabotage people as a zombie" and it's also not round-based as far as I can tell--it's just a "go until you die" game, it seems? or at least that's what it looks like right now.
Basically, yeah. I feel like it could be that kind of game with some modding/tweaking, the engine is there. That's sort of what I meant by that.
