Your standard "murder hobo" style game where you go around a procedurally generated world, kill things, and take their stuff.
It has a simple crafting mechanic to help you make your home village.
The game will have maybe four big levels of progress. These are unlocked by gathering components, summoning a monster, and killing it. Killing the summoned monster will give you components required to unlock additional levels of gameplay.
The target playtime is 40 hours.
Development Nothing ambitious is allowed in this project. The idea is to create something mindless and fun that's not restrained by contracts, politics, coordinating between time zones, hiring other people, baggage inherited from previous owners, etc.
Anything that could be ambitious is scrapped. There are plenty of tools out there, such as the Unreal Engine that can allow someone to make some impressive looking games with minimal effort.
Budget:
From a monitary perspective, I want to keep this well under $2,000.
From a time perspective, each milestone should be around 3 hours, capped at 5 hours.
There can be times where this project is paused, because it's mainly for me to recharge. Also note that I have extraordinarily complicated dev work required for my main projects which will take priority.
Platform
* Steam is the main target. If it can get greenlit and people are willing to pay $20 for it without complaints I'll consider it a huge success.
* Playstation 4 and XBox one are easy adds, so I may add those if doing so is fun to do.
* Rift support is a little more difficult, but I'll probably add it if it does't fall under the "ambitious" category.
Challenges
I still have to work with legal to make sure everything's on the op and up and all that jazz. I'm betting this will take most of the budget.
I also have to keep records of sales because Epic Megagames will need to take their cut. I could always make it free if sales are low and it becomes too much of an effort.
The world was at peace and things were generally hunky dory.
Then being from another dimension came in across the globe and slaughtered most of the population in a matter of days. The horde then gave the survivors an ultimatum: "Join or die"
This naturally pissed off the player's homeworld. The player's homeworld was originally at peace partially because most superpowers had weapons of mass destruction. One of these superpowers used these weapons on the horde's homeworld and reduced the horde's homeworld to ash and glass.
Most of the devastation was against the civilian population. The nations of the player's homeworld had a far superior military force to the horder but they never anticipated this type of attack. The decimation of the civilian populations caused a lot of nations military forces to crumble due to lack of resources to sustain them.
Present day
30 years have passed and the economy is relatively stable again. Most survivors live in giant cities with magical barriers against foreign dimensional rifts, with a bunch of resources spent protecting farms and critical logistical infrastructure.
The horde's masters may have been nearly wiped out, but a bunch of other member dimensions still are ravaging the player's planet.
Player's role diadem fucked around with this message on 11-09-2016 at 06:40 PM.
The player was tasked with retaking old land with a promise of keeping some of it, which is a pretty big reward in the player's kingtom. They are provided with a permanent barrier to make a home base and asked to expand, taking out the local rival warlords while putting up an increasing number of barriers to allow for a stable village to take place and provide additional crops to the main city's.
This is where I pause and may change things. If combat isn't fun then the game is pointless. Swap out to use some FPS assets if that fails, and if FPS fails, scrap the project.
* Create a new biome using the Rome asset toolkit, because the reflections and waters look fucking awesome and require almost no work.
* Dynamicly spawn new biomes at the edges of other biomes. This part may require minimal thinking, but screw it.
* Create a main menu that allows a player to create a new game with a seed id.
* Saving. This may need to be broken into multiple milestones.
* Allow the player to create buildings (no resource limitation yet)
* Add enemy spawn points that the player can destroy.
* Add friendly spawn points that have a capped number of friendly NPCs.
* Let the player create barriers.
* Create some sort of economy.
* Add trees or whatever that can be cut down for resources.
* Introduce the summoning/unlock mechanic
Next:
Work on gameplay elements (new monsters/weapons) and add a bunch of biomes.
Ship it.
