Is this game idea viable? (new take on simulator/god games)

[MadMagzzz]

It's meant as a long term project, so time shouldn't be a problem.

I'm a final year engineering master level student with plenty of experience in coding, control and AI. I'm delving into gamedev as a means to do more creative things with my knowledge.

I've had this crazy idea of a simulator/god game which is a mish-mash of (mainly) Majesty, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress and possibly Minecraft. I want the building depth in DF and DK where you design entire rooms or buildings and then assign purpose to them, attracting different types of creatures (or different human professions if it's all humans).

Akin to Majesty, the creatures are all autonomous and it's up to you to build the society in such a way that it thrives (also allowing me to geek the hell out when it comes to coding interesting behaviors). Now, one aspect I really dislike about DF is how it handles difficulty, essentially throwing harder and harder stuff at you until you die. Like, where do all these thousands of goblins eventually come from? It'd like a game instead that is more static in it's difficulty, akin to Minecraft and the indie gem Kenshi, and having a larger or more advanced society allows you take on greater challenges.

One of the central aspects once the game gets going would be visiting different worlds where different rules apply and different creatures live. World's with/without magic, different tech levels. Undead worlds, hellish worlds, maybe different physics even.

Does anyone have any input on this?

[Matt [Linux]]

sounds pretty cool to me :)
also sounds like a large project, but it looks like you have the technical bg to get this rolling.

[Baroon Valm]

If you have enough time to make it, it's viable.

[Thunderbird]

God Games is a genre with not that many good entries lately and simulators like DF/minecraft have an huge audience, so both are not a bad place for an indie game. Your main mechanic (multiple worlds with different theme and rules) sounds cool, but extremely work-intensive. You will need ways to keep the amount of work needed for those in check.

[MadMagzzz]

Originally posted by Thunderbird:

God Games is a genre with not that many good entries lately and simulators like DF/minecraft have an huge audience, so both are not a bad place for an indie game. Your main mechanic (multiple worlds with different theme and rules) sounds cool, but extremely work-intensive. You will need ways to keep the amount of work needed for those in check.

I'm really fascinated by what I refer to as "math design". In this instance it would be something like boiling the mechanics down to their core elements and making a believable generator out of that by designing the math appropriately. I'd love to experiment with like a creature generator thing, and there you boil it down to things like "how does it move around (if it can)?", "how does it manipulate the world (if it can)?", "what sensory suite does it possess? (ears, eyes etc)". Like, how many such questions does it take to generate believable creatures for example would be an interesting question to delve into.

[Valdar]

Originally posted by MadMagzzz:

I'm really fascinated by what I refer to as "math design". In this instance it would be something like boiling the mechanics down to their core elements and making a believable generator out of that by designing the math appropriately. I'd love to experiment with like a creature generator thing, and there you boil it down to things like "how does it move around (if it can)?", "how does it manipulate the world (if it can)?", "what sensory suite does it possess? (ears, eyes etc)". Like, how many such questions does it take to generate believable creatures for example would be an interesting question to delve into.

What you are describing is commonly referred to as a behavior tree, and there are lots of articles, pseudo-code, and even add-ons to facilitate them. Here are a few links that might help:

https://gdscript.com/godot-behaviour-tree
https://github.com/godot-addons/godot-behavior-tree-plugin
https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/412

[Baherain]

If you are new to game development, be careful not to do feature creep. It is better to have a few features that work well, than a lot of features that do not work at all. Best of luck with your project!

[MadMagzzz]

I'm learning that the hard way. Given my background I'm pretty good at math, so currently looking into various generators. Got a tileset generator so far and I use these tilesets to create different worlds. Currently looking into different noise functions to create pretty worlds. Anyone got any inputs on generators in general or world generators specifically?

[nausea gaming]

That sound really good. You should definitely take a look at that project, and yeah seems a little large