Glad you decided to pop on over 
I've got a few initial questions, although I'm sure I'll have more as and when new features/aspects of the game become unveiled.
1. Do you intend to supply some form of backstory and/or plot? I'm not particularly bothered either way myself, although it may well help you stand out from some of the competition if you do include something like this.
2. Is the gameworld a fixed set of maps or procedurally generated?
3. How moddable do you intend to make this?
4. Do you intend to have some form of enemy, or are you aiming exclusively for player vs environment?
5. What is the predicted sale price?
6. Can you tell me something surprising/unusual about what you hope the final game will be/contain?
Backstory: Working on something. Your guy is not intended to have a strong personality or history, but there may be hints at ancient civilizations. But not a strong narrative structure. The thing I've noticed is, most games have REALLY crappy writing. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few games that have managed to overcome this, by leaving the story almost entirely in the player's head. In the interview I did with Tarn some time back he talked about this.
Gameworld: Randomly generated, of course. Is the whole point.
Modability: I don't know yet. Some of the game's interactions are in fact randomized.
Enemies: I'm not saying there won't be, but they won't explicitly be enemies I'm thinking. They might be hostile, they might be helpful, they might be indifferent. Instead of enemies, think instead natives.
Sale price: Hard to say, but I expect low.
Surprising/unusual: One design aim I'm working towards is that your character doesn't actually "die." All of this is provisional and may not make it into the game, but....
If your character gets crushed or suffocated or drowned or flattened or punched in the face and is unconscious, you'd have a panic button available that sends a robot probe out from base to pick you up. The probe is AI controlled, and has to find its own way to your location. It's also bulky and not be able to fit through tight stone passages; it'd have to break through, changing the game world as it continues. The game counts up the distance it travels and the effort it expends to find you, and that's all converted into a rescue charge once it returns you to base.
The upshot is, you have a big incentive to both get as close as possible to base if you get lost or stuck, and also to prepare the way for potential rescue missions yourself by ensuring the probe will have a clear path to travel through.
Here's a second thing: I don't really know if the game will be a platformer yet. Platforming is useful because it's a standardized kind of game interface that everyone understands immediately by now, that does a fairly good job of presenting a game world in real time and is relatively simple to implement. But I'd really like to present the game in a different way. I don't even know what that means yet. Maybe a point-and-click game, maybe a menu-based interface. Maybe a hybrid of platforming and context-sensitive menus. Terraria emerged on the scene like halfway through the Kickstarter period, and it's a platformer, so it might be useful to go for a different interface just to distinguish my game from it.
As I said in another response, the game's still fairly early. I feel self-conscious about promoting my own work, but I also think the game isn't really far enough along for people to do anything other than snark over it. I've engaged in a fair bit of snark in my time as well (I am a Metafilter member, after all). All I have right now is a prototype and a bundle of ambition. It is not exactly something to crow about. Unfortunately, to make a Kickstarter project go you have to do some crowing, but now I intend to lay low for a while and work on the darn thing.
Yes I have been "around" for a while, if your measure it by account creation time, but I signed up just to make a comment or two long ago I think, I don't even remember what I commented about.
Author
Topic: In Profundis (Read 2892 times)