A game about asteroid impact survival
I'd play that.
I would too.
Me too. Lets create a huge quote pyramid until someone makes it
I was thinking about this. We'll use the Outerra engine. Just need to add the road layer- which adds a set of roads from real-world data- and then procedurally generate cities and structures from population density and satellite imagery. Then add landmark buildings.
Then we have the whole world as it is initially. The hard part is procedurally destroying an area and decaying it abstractly, and having those same effects occur over time when you are present.
Basically, if you try to stay in an office tower, you should be able to see the structures around you get burned down, flooded, destroyed in earthquakes... and yet if you instead drive out into the wilderness, then return to town, you should find the city in the same state.
One way to do this will be to break all cities into lots, which can then have a few attributes (including looted status, structural damage, burnage, water damage, as well as initial structural state...) These could then all change the structure generator. So if a building fails a "survive earthquake" roll, its structural strength could drop down a few points, and it immediately changes model to the same type of structure except damaged.
Now, ideally one would be able to enter buildings but we can't have every building in sight be fully floorplanned. We can instead only generate the outward appearance of a structure in a procedural way, then only fill in buildings in the lot you're currently in... The only problem then is snipers in other, distant lots, but we could probably have those dudes be abstractly positioned "in a window" until you're close enough to generate the floorplan.
So now we just need to store the changes the player makes. That's just a matter of making an overlay for the lot map that shows the player-triggered deviations from the procedural generator; if they loot a building, that lot is marked as "picked clean" the next time the generator looks at that area.
You use more conventional object building for things the player builds.
Now, this is all approaching this issue from a very open-world direction. On the other hand, a didactic linear story would have a number of very significant strengths-
Detailed characters/NPCs.
Much less R&D on building an multiphasic proc city generator
Better-looking areas and more detail.
I guess that one option may be to have something of a first-person branching linear structure. At specific points, you could choose to leave the city, or stay, or simply reach a point where you have enough spare first aid supplies to keep the love interest alive, or not. It would require good writers.