So I bashed my head against C++ on and off for a few years. I struggled mainly to get any libraries to work. My compiler would always refuse to add them, or would add them for a week and then I'd get distracted and come back (without changing anything) and they'd be broken. Then a friend of mine was like "Try Python" and I'm like "holy fuck IT CAN BE THIS EASY!"
I've worked most of my way through a tutorial, but I've mostly veered off, because it's beginning to cover things like game mechanics and code logic - I mostly wanted to understand how to write Python and how to use libtcod's functions. I've gotten a grasp on how to draw a console and how to interpret keystrokes and make the game loop. The rest, like how to have monsters attack and how to draw a map, is stuff I can do on my own without major effort, and it's stuff that should be unique to a game so it's not a huge deal to skip that bit of the tutorial.
So! Looking over the Other Games forum a bit, I've noticed a trend. People want a survival game. UnReal World, Cataclysm, Wayward, Harvest Moon, maybe a little Animal Crossing, along with multiplayers like Haven and Hearth, Wurm, and Minecraft with Terrafirmacraft... people like these games of "farming sim gone hardcore." The only issue is that it never quite fits the bill. Usually it's too easy - once you set your wheat in the ground then the game's over. You've got infinite free food and bears are the most dangerous thing that doesn't hunt you so you can just not go into caves and do perfectly fine.
I figure, hey, why not demoralize myself by making my first real project be a failure of a genre that's mostly explored but rarely perfected? I want to make something that the Bay12 community would approve of, and that terrifies me because I'm not sure I can produce something that tortures the player so expertly. After all, if you're alive then it must be too easy! A delicate balance of undeath is required - if the player is perpetually half-starved then it can be considered a success. The question then is... what would the community like?
My current ideas:
1: The player may do anything the player should do - UnReal World has many items only available from merchants, fairly common items too, like boats and fishing nets. That seems lame. Why can't the player weave a net? UnReal World also has a few exotic items that only traveling merchants will sell, things that cannot be obtained in the local terrain. Allowing the player to do anything the player should be able to do is important, so most all items crafted and most all terrain manipulated.
2: Allow for control over terrain - Build walls, destroy walls, pile dirt, fell trees, dig pits, bucket enough water to make an artificial pond. No arbitrary restrictions on terrain, let anyone with enough shovels level a mountain.
3: Gain employees - Many farming sims fail here, you can only maintain so many tiles of crop before you run out of time in the day to tend them all. Delegating jobs to employees will be essential. You can set up a shack by the river and fish your life, sure, but you can also run a farm of a dozen employees, tending the fields, husbanding the animals (giggity), cooking food, and all the menial chores that one person just can't do alone.
4: Make it deep - Employees get paid to tend the fields. Alright. But why shouldn't they be dishonest sometimes? Why shouldn't you be able to dock their pay if they pull in a poor harvest? Why shouldn't a spurned employee be upset? Why shouldn't an upset farmer set fire to the barn? Why shouldn't you mount your steed and tell him that he has a head start to run as far as he can before you finish loading your rifle? If things are complicated and encourage the player to remain in a small area and deal with several complex factors, then you could have the biggest map in the world and the player would still enjoy their 50 acres perfectly fine.
5: Zombies -
Zombies.
These are the basic ideas I've got so far. They all extend in various ways, of course, but it should hopefully be easy to see the direction of gameplay from these ideas. I will now be accepting ideas to make More Epic (tm) and do my best to make awesome things happen as far as I'm able.
Discuss.