I really love your idea for the game and everything your doing.
The only thing which really gets me is it just looks like you have copy and pasted prison architects art, I really hope you do decide to put more of your own style into it and change it.
Anyway looking forward to it you can never have to many management games.
As I say, that's really a symptom of my own lack of time and skill at art. I'm hoping to Kickstart enough money to get a real artist to actually develop an original style. I do want it to look a bit more unique, definitely.
I dunno. I though slow, painstaking process that can be skipped for X dollars was all the rage these days.
Awesome idea! I should just give it away and have people pay to make it fun. It's like it's free... to play. Yeah. I'll call it free to play!
succession stuff
I really like the idea of escaping the planet and potentially just crashing on another one. I must say, it could be a really depressing ending to the game. On the other hand, stories start out best when you already know the characters.
The problem with DF has always been that once things are going well, there isn't much to do.
I'm approaching this problem from two angles.
First, the AI storyteller. The Storyteller will watch what's happening in the game and toss in whatever combination of incidents have to happen to keep it interesting. So if you somehow end up with some hyper-defended mega-fort, we might just see a solar flare to shut down your defenses, a plague, a crop blight, combined with a couple strong raids. Anything to keep the story from stagnating. And this is done adaptively, so you don't get rolled over if you're a newbie or already on the ropes.
Ideally the storyteller will knock you down and up but usually not kill you. Losing itself isn't fun - what's fun is the paroxysms of drama that come beforehand. What if you could have those but not quite lose most of the time?
The second element is the endgame, which is that you build a ship and escape the planet. This means collecting lots of tough-to-get resources by trading, theft, construction, research, etc and assembling them into the ship.
I really want to do some drama at the end of the game where not all the colonists can go, or really bad things start happening just as you approach the finish line. Again, this is all storyteller-driven. Because that's how real stories work best - great challenge near the climactic finish line. No reason we can't generate that adaptively in a simulation.
Thanks for the questions and support everyone! It really does help after so long working alone to see that someone sees some potential in this.