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[zoombapup]

The concept seems interesting enough, I'll try and watch your videos over the weekend and provide any constructive feedback I'm able to.

Are you in a position where you can give an ETA on an early alpha/prototype release?

I'm going to do some local testing in the next 2 weeks with some of my students. Then a couple of weeks to incorporate their feedback. So I would think 4-6 weeks for the first phase (the building aspects). I'm planning on doing all of this as an iterative development thing, because its pretty much in line with how I design. I like to follow the flow of what the game is suggesting to me. So once that first phase is out, there will be iterative updates from there on. The first release will likely be really horrible, because most of it will still be programmer art. But I've gotten a new couple of artists recently so things will improve visually too.

[burningpet]

Well i must say that the idea is presented in such manner that leave more questions, which can be good as it sparks interest, but it is also so confusing, that i am really having hard time imagining how it will play.

The theme is excellent and you sound like you have the technical means in supporting it, but it all comes down to what the player will be able to do in the world and what challenges they will face (and i must say that from reading the title alone, you have got my imagination rolling, while the introduction left me with a big question mark).

Will the NPC face some sort of danger? be it from starving, falling down because the rig got broken for some reason or any other non combative manner.

[Gamerlord]

Oh, that reminds me, what sort of theme are you going for? Self sufficiency, isolation, what?

[zoombapup]

Remember: There WILL be bugs, and they WILL be exploited, and people WILL weaponise things that weren't meant to be weaponised...

Seriously, you can't prepare for all the possibilities, but certainly prepare for as many as possible. And don't leave anything embarrassing in the code.

Hehehe yeah. 

I'm just trying to avoid the case that the guys who wrote Amnesia (horror game) talked about, where you give a player a tool and the whole world is then viewed through the lens of "what happens if I use this tool on X", they noticed that giving the player a spoon took away the horror aspect, because they would try and take on the monster with a spoon. Once they took the spoon away, then the game became scary, because players realized that they were powerless.

[zoombapup]

Well i must say that the idea is presented in such manner that leave more questions, which can be good as it sparks interest, but it is also so confusing, that i am really having hard time imagining how it will play.

The theme is excellent and you sound like you have the technical means in supporting it, but it all comes down to what the player will be able to do in the world and what challenges they will face (and i must say that from reading the title alone, you have got my imagination rolling, while the introduction left me with a big question mark).

Will the NPC face some sort of danger? be it from starving, falling down because the rig got broken for some reason or any other non combative manner.

The notional game, is to build the rig up from a relative skelton into a thriving community. So the "risk" I guess, is that you fail to build the rig in a way that invites NPC's. I'm kind of thinking along the lines of Harvest Moon and SimCity here. In that some aspects of the player-NPC-rig relationship are about personal attachments, while others are purely functional, like "does an NPC have somewhere to sleep". Fulfilling the needs of the NPC in terms of fundamental needs and social needs are what I mean when I say its "sims like".

The challenge is more of a construction one, but with social elements in it. So can you build a rig that encourages trade income, but balances it with social function (an example would be can you build  a system of trade that doesn't lower the living standards of the people on the rig?).

Its kind of hard because I can't point to a single example of a game like this. But only to examples of features from other games. So it sounds like I'm being too ambitious and trying to make all of them, when in reality I'm simply picking aspects or mechanics I like from other games and trying to experiment with them.

My main way of approaching this is to try and think of what I would want a community to feel like if I were in charge. What would that be like. Then layer on a fantasy setting that has different laws of physics etc.

[zoombapup]

Oh, that reminds me, what sort of theme are you going for? Self sufficiency, isolation, what?

I'm trying to be as open as possible. If you as a player want isolation, then there are things you can do to create that (social interactions and trade deals you can refuse for instance). But I guess my theme has to be sort of "growth of a family/community". I want to experiment with the feeling of belonging somewhere that you built. I figure most of us never will have the chance to found a community, to set its ethics and social structure in place etc. But thats what makes games so powerful. I guess its like a social simulation, but with the freedom of a sandbox-oriented builder game.

I know it all sounds a bit vague, but there's no way I can give you an existing example of what I'm talking about. I've been hammering on for years at the game development community to explore "characters" from an AI perspective. Not just as tokens to be pushed around a game-board, but as more "believable" creatures. As living things that cohabit a game world. So I'm taking those thoughts and transforming them into a game. Just a game that happens to have some weird physics-based tools to play with

[Gamerlord]

Ah. That sounds both difficult to code and awesome to play.