A dungeon-crawler survival cooking game. Working Title:
Project Cauldron.
In the original Ultima Underworld, you are thrown into a dungeon as punishment for a crime you didn't commit, and forced to survive. You need to eat, drink, and sleep. Really amazing how these features have only become mainstream over twenty years later. The underworld itself has all kinds of different groups of people living down there, and I remember wondering about how they got their food. Was there a steady stream of prisoners bringing in supplies? Was somebody trading with them? Maybe some smaller creatures could survive off moss and mushrooms, and larger creatures would eat them, and so on. Maybe the fish that swam in the underground rivers were another major food source. It was really an interesting idea.
Turns out, it's also an idea that has been fleshed out in the last couple of years in a great manga called
Delicious in Dungeon ( ダンジョン飯), where they take that kind of problem and run with it. I just finished reading the latest book in the series (the 3rd one now). Such a great manga. Basically its a gourmet cooking manga set in an RPG dungeon. The dungeon has a kind of ecology, and the clever adventurer can find all kinds of food around to eat so as to help them get by. The small monsters are eaten by the middle sized monsters, who are in turn eaten by the larger monsters. Adventurers keep things in check, as the kind of apex predator. But if they aren't careful they can throw things out of balance.
So, the game I would like to see (and maybe make after Innkeep), is a dungeon crawler survival game, with a focus on cooking.
It would be similar to a rougelike, in that you are in a randomly generated dungeon, and it's perma-death.
However, the focus would be shifted away from experience gain and combat focused equipment looting, and towards the gathering and cooking of food. Imagine Don't Starve set in a dungeon, and with a Dwarf-Fortress-esque generation of the dungeon population. Most importantly, the dungeon would have some kind of ecology modeled. That ecology could factor in creatures/adventurers coming in from outside, but populations of certain monsters could collapse if you hunt them too heavily, which could have knock-on effects.
A key feature would be a craft system that is all about cooking. So heaps of different ways of turning pieces of monsters etc. into food, cooking them, and eating them.