I hate camping with a vengence - a couple of days ago, during a random conversation about my less than traditional camping exploits (such as lazy ways to start the camp fire, and sleeping in a hotel overnight) I thought there might be a game in this.

I want to spend about a week on this game; it will be a web game (HTML5) with top down graphics, nothing fancy.

So far, I have the following ideas about how it will work:

Each day consists of 10 minutes (or something similar) of daytime, and 10 minutes of night time. You have to manage your hunger, fatigue, and personal hygiene. What I might do is split this along levels, with alternating day and night levels. Perhaps during the night you do more stealing activities and during the day, more survival activities.

Each day, you have a series of challenges. You start out on day 1, missing several items, which you have to steal from other plots, without being caught.

There is a backing story which you are introduced to at the start, although I'm not sure what this could be. Sometimes, squirrels will try to steal your stuff; cows will wander onto your plot and break things, and of course it must pour with rain most of the time because this is a camping holiday.

Any ideas for this are welcome. What amusing challenges could I set for the player, which would be possible to implement within a top down, tile based environment? I don't just want fetch quests.

I might call the game "Wish You Were Here."

I was hoping to have other humans on other camping plots in the game, although the hunting idea is not so bad. The sort of gameplay I'm hoping for is one where you are the "rogue element" within the camp site, the one person who doesn't want to be there, as if you were forced by family or something. I'm currently hacking together the boilerplate for this project. I like the archery concept though. A torch could be one of the things you can steal from another camp site

I read camping and I kept thinking you meant camping in the shooter sense. Hah!

Anyhow, I like the idea a lot. I took it as, in the daytime you are a nice guy doing benevolent actions such as farming, raising livestock, building your campground, and so on. At night you are pretty much a bad guy, looking to steal, poach, etc.

I like the dual nature of the game - good at times, evil at others. I can imagine scenarios where the player wants to be a bad guy all the time, even though the evil actions may not be available during the day. However he could still do questionable actions such as leave his neighbors pig pen door open ("Oops, did they get out?"), or somehow pinning his nocturnal activities on someone else. Lots of possibilities here.

I really like this sort of sneaking about and causing merry havoc to other people - reckon it would make a fun casual game.

One idea I would seriously recommend is giving every object a set of tags (e.g. explosive, flammable, electric, valuable, food, attracts_bears, etc) and building a set of things that can interact with each object. This is a brilliant way to develop some emergent behaviour which can lead to The Devs Thought Of Everything or unexpected fun.

This is part of the reason behind minecraft's success. Redstone is designed to lead to emergent behaviour. Notch never planned to let people make whole computers, and yet here we are.

I really like the idea behind this game! I could definitely see it being a ton of fun if done well!

My best idea I could give you is to throw in a bit of comical pain into the game, and incorporate a lot of innovation into it - enable the player to interact with the environment and spring some other events up on unsuspecting fellow campers. For example, divert floods into your "enemies" tents, then steal their food while they're running out in havoc... Or perhaps light their food on fire, and sneak in while thats going.

Maybe dumb some of the other campers food out and watch all the animals become attracted to the area. Try to abuse the wealthier campers resources for your own gain.

There's a lot of different places you could go with this if its a "Camper Gone Wild" sort of game. Perhaps keep it a havoc-recking game where you barely need to mind resources, or the exact opposite and use stealing as a last-resort sort of deal. Maybe even have your own family involved and a misery index for how frusturated they are becoming?

I really like the idea behind this game! I could definitely see it being a ton of fun if done well!

My best idea I could give you is to throw in a bit of comical pain into the game, and incorporate a lot of innovation into it - enable the player to interact with the environment and spring some other events up on unsuspecting fellow campers. For example, divert floods into your "enemies" tents, then steal their food while they're running out in havoc... Or perhaps light their food on fire, and sneak in while thats going.

Maybe dumb some of the other campers food out and watch all the animals become attracted to the area. Try to abuse the wealthier campers resources for your own gain.

There's a lot of different places you could go with this if its a "Camper Gone Wild" sort of game. Perhaps keep it a havoc-recking game where you barely need to mind resources, or the exact opposite and use stealing as a last-resort sort of deal. Maybe even have your own family involved and a misery index for how frusturated they are becoming?

I had an awesome idea based on what you just said - the last canvas game I did was an ant game - ill add an ants nest and let you divert the ants into other's camp sites xD