First post in this forum. Team of one. 17 years experience in desktop applications in VB.NET, no experience in making a game. No experience in making assets. Loved games since 1990s.

I want to make a game, but my abilities limit me to a 2D top down 1st generation NES game. Just learned how to make a map editor with 32*32 tiles, but I know a lot about making classes, handling a lot of objects in memory, inheritance, and such. So I aim to work on my strengths. I can't do graphics, so I'll make a game that is strong on the other departments.

*As very few resources are used for graphics (I get 100 000 fps on an old laptop that hardly can handle Fallout 4 on lowest setting, when working on only the map), I can spend a lot of resources on handling things in memory.

*Responsive and persistent environment. Grass that grows and dies depending on season, availability of water and sun, damage from people walking on them, animals grazing. A slot that is often walked on will automatically turn into a road as all grass on it will die out. Until nobody walks on it, and the surrounding grass will again spread to that area. Damage due to combat is persistent. Animals will be able to graze on the grass until its finished, then the grass grows back, until growing season ends.

*The entire world, all persons and animals, are represented live in memory, so no random encounters. You see a local bear? It has a name, and searches for food, mates and has children even when out of sight. If you kill it, the children might starve to death, resulting in too few predators, resulting in a larger population of herbivores for the player to hunt.

*All humans and animals have complex AI where they have to satisfy their physical and emotional needs. Food, water, shelter are basics. Food will add calories, activity will drain calories, caloric surplus will enable muscle growth if the individual muscles are activated, otherwise stored as fat.

*Battles between enemy factions taking place outside of the field of view of the player (think Civilization), and the battles will leave persistent damage on the environment and the population of the factions involved. Player may stumble upon site of previous conflicts, and if the site weren't cleared, bodies and armaments might litter the floor.

*Player can switch between different characters that are in the group. All characters are killable. All death is permadeath with emotional consequences for the characters involved. Saving is automatic in real time, as all files are updated to mirror what is going on in memory. There are no previous states to load. Burial with corresponding ceremonies will occur. Failure to have a burial ceremony will have emotional impact. Player can have a winform up for each character in the group, so multiple screens will be useful. So you can have a hunting party out in one corner, a scouting party on another corner, and the base personal, all having their own winform, all acting in real time. Game will be pausable. Dialog can have characters generate new winforms were one can see memories they are reliving.

*All actives will require calories based on effort and time required. All tasks will take realistic amount of time, including building, mining and all other time consuming events. Damage to muscles will need to heal for them to be able to perform again, so healing will take realistic amount of time.

*Looting, hunting, base building, farming etc. Farming will require huge areas to be fenced and the ground worked on, and will yield crops after a full natural growth cycle. Oh, you grew some crops? That will trigger the herbivores to come and eat. Oh, you killed them? That will trigger the carnivores to search out food when hungry, meaning you and your cattle. Oh, you learned that the hard way? Maybe put up some fences and just scare of the herbivores, until you got the manpower to kill the carnivores. And not too many of them, or it will trigger hunger in the apex-carnivores. You want to kill the local apex-carnivores? How, you got no gunpowder. Better start using some manure to make some gunpowder, provided you actually know how to do that, and have the mining required for the minerals required... also, now you got shortage of fertilizers. And yeah, it's gonna be low grade gunpowder. You got the apex-predator? Now you own the local area, but don't draw to much attention or the local warlords will want to make you an offer you can't resist...

*Procreation will be realistic, including sexual dimorphism that extends to physical and emotional differences. If the player does not have their characters have children, the game ends after the first generations dies, unless new characters are constantly recruited into the group. Having children will have benefits that will outweigh their great cost.

*Game play will cover several generations were technological advances will progress from post-apocalyptic to recovered humanity.

Having created this, I will then proceed to see what I can do with it.

Well, either that, or I abandon it undone. I'm hyped at the moment.

If I manage to the the AI and game engine right, I'm hopping to be able to attract some people who are interested in doing some assets, dialog and such. If I do get that far, the game will probably be free-to-play with DLCs, or if possible, just patreon. I envision a wiki-style development were the players are simultaneously developing the game, in forks, each fork having it's own guiding constitution.

I don't know, dreaming is cheap. Have worked for about a few weeks on it. I'm still working on the map editor. Here is the site of the game: http://blog.wastelandgenerations.com/youtube/

Oh my god.

That is sooo close to what I had envisioned! I'm not sure if I should be discouraged about not being first, or encouraged that my full vision is evidently much closer to being doable and indeed marketable!

I appreciate you reply!

Yeah, I'm going forward. I envision greater depth than Rimworld has, an I'm still quite surprised at how incredibly alike my vision that game is, although not quite as deep. I guess if you have a solid premise, the implementation ends up the same.

Alright, I'm off to create grass that will grow depending on sun, water and season, and then a cow that will feed on it. 

Check out my blog if you are curios regarding my progress, and message me if you want a copy of the latest in-development version. Or if you want to join the project.

I'ill get back to this site when I have some significant progress to show.

" too manny games these days are just uninteresting because they all hold your had and put marks over everything you need to pickup or head towards. "

I had in fact envisioned dead ends in the tech tree. Take a look at this:

So, I was going to give the player the possibility to do leather armor, and just make it suck in every way the video describes. And have in fact in-game manuals or books that explain that very thing, that leather armors are doable, but are in fact bad in every way. So it's going to be a learning curve were the player learns about how the world actually works, and in that way incentives them to replay and not waste their time on things they thought were good but in fact weren't.

Same thing with fire arrows:

Yeah, I'll add a lot of ways for the player to spend time to invent fire arrows, just to have them all show that it is in fact not doable in any practical way.

What do you think, are dead end techs a good or bad idea? It will most certainly fuel the message boards!

My idea is that ALL technology is available in the game world from the start, the only question is how much skill the individual professional has. They can either learn as they go along, or gain huge tech jumps by getting their hand on technical manual from, say, a pre-war library, givning incentives to explore. Maybe some schematics on how to build some gadget in a safe in some pre-war company HQ.

But even if you don't know how to build a generator, you can always bring back home one if you manage to find one. And if you visit a museum, you might find a set of full plate armor!

All weapons and armors will be subjected to tear and wear, and it requires skill, material and time to repair them.

The main idea is that the limiting factor isn't material, time or knowledge. There will be an abundance of all three. The main limiting factor will be.., human labor and skill. Having an infrastructure that can support the industry,

All pre-war military installations are pretty much raided by the established big factions in the game, with a few small secluded exceptions. And most of what the big factions have is starting to deplete due to wars. What you find might be good for a few hunting expeditions to get you set, or maybe also to take out a small hostile faction, but then you are out. By then, you are back to what your own industry can output, either producing low quality gunpowder, or something else you can trade for military gear.

If you aren't careful and a big part of your population dies in a war, you might be back to lower tier technology, lacking the industry to output what your previously could.

In that way, diplomacy will be of greater importance than military might, although military might makes diplomacy more efficient. Trade and good maners will convince other groups to join your group, and as your relations with the new arrivals improve, you get to control them more and more directly. If somebody starts having an extra marital affair, jealousy will break out, resulting in a character losing control and killing the other person, and if those things aren't dealt with, it will affect the loyalty of the entire community, removing the players possibility to directly control doubting characters.

Having children will be a huge priority, as you get to give them the exact values that are required to create an efficient, loyal, skillful and happy colony.

Military actions, due to the high cost of having soldiers killed, should be avoided at all cost. Unless you are rich enough to hire mercenaries, or are careful to only engage small colonies that are diplomatically isolated and lack allies.

Again, all weapon and armor tiers will be available from the start. And they will all have realistically costs. Either by impeding mobility and perception, or simply being hot and increasing water consumption, or being heavy and increasing caloric consumption, or being to valuable to risk them having damaged in low-consequence battles.

Heavy weapons will be... heavy:

Having soldiers moving in heavy will not be possible unless you can supply them with top quality food while they are in the field, and even more important, have enough food to allow them to develop the muscles necessary to handle the equipment. Most of the early game will be in starvation mode, and as soon as you find some food, your thoughts will go towards sharing it with some friently settler for doubling the skill pool, not to consume more.

A normal human can survive with 800 calories per day. But on the other hand:

An army of professional soldiers will require several farms in order to maintain the caloric cost, and you aren't going to have any farms unless you are able to protect them to being with...

Yeah ;D