Game
This game is supposed to be Factorio-like but with some of the perceived "issues" "fixed". These are not real issues, but part of the challenging constraints of Factorio's gameplay. An example - when you get further into the game and use blueprints, sometimes you need to change the design of your blueprint later. But everything created out of the blueprint isn't automatically updated. Here, we consider a virtual, software-like scenario where, whenever you improve a component that you've used in multiple places, everywhere you've used that component automatically gets the benefits. This follows the same ideas as programming software.
Purpose
The purpose of this game is still not yet known. In Factorio, the primary goals are to survive the biters and launch a rocket. We certainly want a biter-like challenge (virus/malware? competitor factions trying to hack you?) and some kind of end goal, but it's not decided yet.
Artistic Themes
We want the themes to be computer-oriented. Think of backgrounds like synthwave album cover art, and PCB/motherboards.
Progression
Some thoughts on progression: unlock more RAM/CPU, and/or more core functions.
Design Challenges
As of right now, we're not sure where these magical "resources" are supposed to come from. Do we suck data out of the internet and process it? How "realistic" should it be? We still hope for it to be game-like with a wide enough audience. We also don't want to accidentally develop something that people could see as "creepy". For example, there's a game on Steam called "Learning Factory". One of the reviews said that while the game is fun and the mechanics are interesting, it reminds them too much of Amazon (and apparently the game mentions Amazon directly) and there's mechanics for optimizing the price to extract the most value out of your cat customers for the items you sell them (such as balls of yarn). We also want to balance complexity and simplicity. The goal is "easy to learn, challenging to master." A game which you can sink tens or hundreds of hours into and feel your time was well-spent on an enjoyable experience.
Mining Resources
For now, we must make progress somehow. As of this week, we can "mine resources"! All it does is iterate through all the patches it's on top of and decrement their amount. The amounts can even go negative and it doesn't remove the ore patch, but all the parts are joined together and updating properly. While mining resources may or may not fit into the final view of the game, we must begin somewhere, and this is somewhere.
Inspiration
As mentioned previously, this is inspired by Factorio, but as many concerned individuals note, there are many-a-Factorio-clone, and our goal is to make something genuinely new. But as it's easier to copy than to dream up entire worlds from scratch, we must begin somewhere. Factorio is unbelievably beautifully optimized to handle thousands, tens of thousands, of entities, machines, and items. This is heavy inspiration for this game and we hope to get to a point where lots of neat tricks are needed to keep the game moving smoothly even as the scope expands to mind-boggling proportions.
I originally wrote an Asteroids clone in middle school for my "8th grade exhibition project". It was written in Blitz Basic; I didn't know how to organize my code and didn't have any mentor or tutor, so every change or enhancement to the code was a huge struggle. Now, thanks to a BS in Computer Science (not everyone needs one of those dang things anyhow), and several books including Game Programming Patterns by our munificent Robert Nystrom and the original Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by our fearless Gang of Four, we have a base on which to build something maintainable, extensible, and beautiful.
Closing
Thank you for joining us for our first week! We are incredibly excited to begin this journey!!!