Soooo.... I've been working out some of the ideas I've had in mind for the game I've been building all this silly infrastructure for.. haha. 

I know, I'm the most backwards thing you've probably ever heard of.

Anyhow, I've always been a huge fan of games with some real-time strategy elements built in.  So, I guess that's more or less the genre I'm going with here. 

I've sketched up some major "objectives" or game "phases", I'm not sure if these will be actual *** OBJECTIVE COMPLETED *** YOU MAY NOW PROCEED TO LEVEL 2 ***, type objectives, but regardless.  Most of these objectives past #2 will correspond to a specific "quest" type activity that will be presented to the player for their somewhat optional consideration.

Here they are:

Objective 1: Minimal operational status.

• The player will work through making repairs to their bot with found parts until it is at minimal operational status.
• This will also serve to tutorialize some main game-play elements.

Story Elements: Post intro: First person camera, bot comes online slowly with errors flashing in from all angles.  Some appendage is severely damaged, or missing.  Some other major systems are offline or considerably hindered and in need of immediate(limited time) repair.  Damages will be randomized so each attempt will be different, it could/and possibly should take a few tries to get a working bot out of the beginning gauntlet.

Antagonists: Lower Bots, bots who have achieved some level of self-awareness yet exhibit almost zero predictably conscientious behavior.  These bots will seek to either dismantle the player bot or to befriend it, or sometimes, both...

Objective 2: Basic Crafting, Recycling and Mining.

• The player will master basic crafting skills required to make simple parts from recycled, or raw elemental matter, and repair them in the field.

Story Elements: Player has achieved nearly full operational status and has begun exploring the "world", aided by all kinds of indicators and on-screen displays the player has discovered the usefulness of the garbage piles as well as discovered how to mine resources directly from the moon itself.

Antagonists: Lower bots, Peer player bots, junk haulers, and guard patrols.

Notes: New players will be dropped into a part of the world that will be hard to get back into(kinda pointless as well) once you've completed Objective 2.  This place will be a fairly hostile dumping ground where bots are consistently dropped from great heights and regularly used as target practice by the haulers(human) and guards(human).

Objective 3: Bot Programming.

• The player will learn how to connect to other bots in order to encode their loyalty and put them to task.

Story Elements: The player has achieved Objective 2 and has escaped from the "intro zone"..  Now begins the game, the first narrative characters will appear at this time and will instruct the player in ways they can proceed to find territory and to assert their control over the lower bots.

Antagonists: Lower bots, Peer player bots, only occasional haulers and guard patrols.

Objective 4: Bot Networking.

• The player will obtain the hardware/software upgrades necessary to connect to other loyalty encoded bots for the purpose of combining processing power and increasing their ability to perform complex tasks(Max of 5 to 10 per player).
• This stage will also introduce shared loyalty, where multiple player bots can use the same loyalty code, thus enabling multiple players to collaborate without their loyal bots fighting each other.  Command loyalty always resides with the last programmer, so they only obey orders from the programmer that encoded them most recently.

Story Elements: First major quest taking the player an extremely long distance away from their "territory".  The player will have to prepare their band of loyal bots pretty well in order to make it back with the prize.
Antagonists: Aside from major narrative related NPCs the antagonists from this stage forward will primarily be other players and their loyal bots competing for resources plus some mob type activity from lower bots here and there.

Objective 5: Advanced Crafting.

• The player will learn how to repair damaged bot MagCores and to build and repair various other complex components.  MagCores are the future processors that when combined in two or more pairs(4+ cores) have the power spark self-awareness.

Story Elements: It takes one core to run the MagMagic tech that makes a bot mobile, it takes 2 to make it do anything with it.  When redundancy was added, that's when strange things started to happen.  Narrative characters will be used to explain how things came to be, and what can be done about it.

Objective 6: Incorporation.

• Using all the skills learned thus far the player will begin building a small functional production site(town).  Raw materials will be gathered and processed in various structures.
• Defensive structures will be built and the site will be guarded by technology developed and deployed by the player and their loyal bots.

Objective 7: Production.

• During this phase the player will be encouraged through narration to build their production capacities up to the established minimum levels across the board.

Objective 8: Mobilization.

• With production solidly under way, its time to begin thinking about the bigger picture, what resources can we mine if we have some faster transportation?  What can we make then?

Objective 9: Infrastructure.

• Through constant attacks(greater mobilization only makes the attacks worse) from other players/hordes and mob/npc characters alike, the player will be encouraged to build up their infrastructure/armaments to meet the demand.  Until they are no longer threatened within their territory.

Objective 10: Discovery.

• The player will discover the original production site for the MagCore technology burried beneath the rubble of this garbage moon and will learn the original source of its power.

Story Elements: This will end the primary narrative of the main story-line.

So, its something like a real-time strategy game, just with a handful of units per player, and on a fairly massive 3D world with lots of resources and cool stuff to make.  Battles to fight, production sites to protect, mines to guard.  Mysteries to discover, and a moon to transform from a garbage heap into the shining example of what an aware and sentient mind in a robot body can build.   Or you can just go rogue and wander around exploring the planet, helping lower bots achieve higher levels of awareness and consciousness, participating in small narrative quests and the like.  Or maybe you'll build a roving horde and dismantle your way across the terrain building your core collection as you go, leaving only the empty shells of the bots who got in your path.  In the wild only the smartest bots survive...  The choice is yours really. 

My goal is to have enough narrative to support a full introduction and a solid set of objectives for the beginning and intermediate play levels, yet be able to fade out in the middle in favor of more pvp rts/3rd/1st person play, and then when the player has proved their dominance, provide a subtle yet powerful kind of closure to the main story arc without concluding the game.

Well, how does it sound to you?  I think I'm starting to feel it..