Well, we can help fill in gaps in skills, though we can't create more time for
you. :)
Heh, I'll bear that in mind. I positively adore games, so should I ever
manage to carve some free time out, I'll be all over it. If anyone else
picks it up I'll certainly tune in with ideas, and I can cobble together
ok artwork.
I wonder how the design flaws (i.e. not enough to do to stay involved) could be
fixed, without turning it into a totally different game? Let's discuss.
One thought I had was to posit that you (the player) are a member of an
advanced spacefaring civilization, and it's your job to shepherd this planet
over millions (or billions) of years, to foster new civilizations to join the
galactic club. Your project has a budget, which you can spend on reasonable
interventions -- causing (or avoiding) asteroid/comet impacts, orbital sun
shades or focusing mirrors, increasing the mutation rate (by introducing
metagens into the environment), picking up critters and moving them elsewhere,
and making minor changes to the terrain, etc. But you don't get to change any
basic laws of physics, nor tweak every constant in the simulation.
Sounds good. I suppose you'd need something to notify the player that
certain "wild" events were going to occur in x number of turns, and then
it'd be up to the player to judiciously use their budget to either
counter or exploit said event. Say an impending massive meteor strike,
for instance. If you're early in and the budget is relatively small,
maybe you'd try to encourage the critters to migrate, via climate
impact, natural disaster, or whatever, whereas later in the game you
might have an area built up just so, and your budget is higher, so you
make the huge expenditure and simply destroy the meteor. Perhaps a
clever exploitation of such an event would be a moderate expenditure to
segment the incoming meteor, so that while the immediate strike is
lessened, the ecological impact is more widespread, perhaps gambling
that the resultant climate shift will prove favorable to your critter.
You get paid for results -- at each "turn" (a period of time equal to, say, 5
minutes of play at normal speed), you get more money based on the complexity and density
of life/civilization on your planet.
I think that's a great idea. I recall X-Com/X-Com2 having a similar pay
structure, wherein your efforts were judged by various nations at the
end of a game month and your pay altered accordingly.
The game would have a clear goal -- developing a new spacefaring civilization
-- tools to accomplish it with, and a budget to maintain. (I know the original
SimEarth had something similar, but it wasn't as well-defined and tended to get
in the way more than add to the fun.) Different scenarios would all have the
same goals and rules, but would have different starting conditions: some
planets would be outside the normal habitable zone, for example, or might be
inside it but in the midst of some ecological crisis. You're the guy they
stuck trying to clean up the mess and save the planet. You'd get a score at
the end based on the time it took to reach spacefaring, and achievement of
bonus objectives; and there'd be a high-scores list for each scenario.
That sounds like a great premise. Simple, but allowing for some subtle
gameplay.
I think this would be fun to play. But what do you-all think about it?
Fargo, do you still have your SimEarth manual around?
Wow, good lord no. I had it for the SNES, and I'm afraid that's been
lost to the vagaries of time. I think the manual was casualty even
before the game was.
I have mine in a box somewhere. It'd probably provide some valuable insights
on the various cycles, though we wouldn't want to let that constrain us too
much -- the key in making this a doable project would be to focus on the
details that make it fun, and take shortcuts on the rest.
Cheers,
- Joe
--
Joe Strout -- joe at strout dot net
Verified Express, LLC "Making the Internet a Better Place"
http://www.verex.com/
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