had an epiphany about yesterday's post.
A sandbox survival game with prehistoric creatures but its on planetary scale like say, Planet Explorers, Empyrion Galactic Survival or Space engineers. there's a singleplayer campaign that introduces the game and the mechanics to the player, along with explaining the lore. the basic idea is that the player was part of the crew in a colonization fleet. due to some sabotage the entire fleet crash landed on the planet (setting feels like a mix between Homeworld and Subnautica). the players wake up on a cryogenic pod after 500 years when the planet has been successfully terraformed to Earth-like qualitys of habitability.
Fleet Command which has survived all these centuries by merging with the mothership computer gives the player the training and the tools required to venture out into the wilds with a mission, to uncover what the heck happened to the fleet, how much people survived the crash, how's the current situation of the planet biosphere and who is the one responsible for the sabotage. and the most important, is it possible to contact with Earth?
The planet would be procedurally generated with biomes proper to the planetary conditions and everything. prehistoric animals were a byproduct of the malfunctions of the terraforming programming and the AI tasked with the automation process has run rampant not only bringing close to accurate animals from different geological eras but also fabricating new ones (these fabricated animals are inspired more on Speculative Evolution than on fantasy/sci fi) to fill gaps and utilities on the ecosystem.
However, the behavior of the AI isnt erratic, there's a mastermind behind all of this. but the player will have to uncover the plot exploring, surviving and dealing with NPCs. from tribes of wild men descendants of survivors that woke up early in a much more incomplete planet to factions of cryogenized crew that have survived on the rest of the escort ships and which are pursuing their own personal agendas to a mysterious force that would be later revealed and is key in the sucess of the mission.
in short, its like a mix between ARK + Fallout + Empyrion/Space Engineers + Planet Explorers + some references to a few other space games.