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[Pitxardo]

Remembering this thread... Finally, after a long stop, I move to the 3D version (please, ignore mockup captures )

The idea is to create a god game where you manage the planet and life.
Very similar to Sim Earth, but with some changes and improvements, specially in gameplay.

Currently, the features to include in the game are:
- Living planets. No artificial pre-calculated sea level: all water flows and create seas or lakes using cellular automaton. Same for the air and clouds. You can manage planet changing distance from Sun and then temperature, moving terrain, creating volcanoes, earthquakes and meteor impacts (this part is done).

- Living plants. Create different plants selecting some properties for each species and watch how grows and "contaminate" the planet. This part is like the "Game of Life", not too much to do except put the first seed and see the result.

- Living fauna. Be a godfather of a cell. Force evolution, help surviving and grow up until create an intelligent animal. Each evolution process will create a new branch, creating two species (not evolved one and evolved one) resulting in different animals in the future. You will sponsor only one specie and your duty is to avoid the extinction of them. Something similar to Spore, but without individual control.

- Civilization. Manage cities, economy, wars, colonization, investigation... this part is going to be similar to Civilization but in real time and without control on individual units: you set an "order-flag" and units will go there to do the action.

The game uses a 2D aerial camera, tile based map with simple 2D sprites.
Not fancy graphics (at least, for the moment).


Do you thing this is a crazy idea? Too hardcore for players?  
What would you change? What would you add? What would you remove?

And more important (specially considering Sim Earth), Could be enjoyable?  

[valrus]

I would play it!  The most interesting part to me is the fauna "sponsoring"; it almost sounds like a gambling game or stock-market game.  ("Gamblearth"!)  (I think it would be more interesting if you could place your "chips" on more than one species, though.  If this is a low-interaction game, maybe let me have multiple irons in the fire so I can have lots of stuff to watch, and/or be really busy if I choose.)

Having a more realistic model of speciation would be interesting, and could be done with your tools.  That is, it's not really like SimEarth where you (say) had chimps and then poof one instance of "chimp" evolves into "bonobo".  You get chimps and bonobos from an ancestral population when the partitions of the population are out-of-contact for a long enough time, so that progressive mutations in each branch don't spread through the whole, to the point where they're far enough away that recontact won't lead to fertile offspring.  You've got the tools for that: terrain modification, flowing water, etc.

[Pitxardo]

Good point!

I was thinking that instead of be a godfather of one life form you can manage all life forms until one of them become intelligent. This is only for this stage of the game.

So, in the evolution stage, every 1 minute (for example) you need to spend one evolution point in one creature in the map, evolving to the next generation. At the same time you are spending that point, computer will spend another point in another random creature in the world increasing or decreasing a random property (mutation) and then causing evolution.

I need to think about how to do miscegenation, or maybe avoid it because could be too complicated for the player.

In this stage I would like to do some kind of puzzle-game in real time. If you evolve one creature to a carnivore one and the neighboring creatures are weaker, then the new creature can annihilate and extinguish the weaker creatures. You need to find a balance, or maybe you want to remove these weaker creatures...

Your main target in this stage is to evolve at least one creature into an intelligent animal and start a civilization. You can force evolution spending evolution points, also do some extra stuff to manipulate the spreading of creatures killing or supporting some of them. I need to think what kind of stuff player can do...

After that, in Civilization stage, evolution will continue but only managed by the computer and lot more slowly.

It's important to force the player's constant interaction and instant cause and effect in every decision. Otherwise could be boring 

[Dacke]

It's a neat idea and I think many of us have thought about doing similar things. But my personal conclusion has always been that it's too ambitious. You have managed to include lots of things that are generally difficult to do well in games.

• Evolution
• Big simulations
• Deep time
• Dynamic 3D content
• Big, diverse 3D worlds (never mind entire planets)
• Grid based automatons on a sphere
• Different separate stages in a game (i.e. many games in one)

I'm not saying that any one of these things are hopelessly difficult to do on their own, but taken together it's probably a bit much.

Examples that come to mind are Dwarf Fortress and Spore, which separately tries to do some of these things. DF is still in Alpha after 8 years. Spore looked really interesting in the prototype stages, but it turned out to be too ambitious even for a big team and they dumbed it down into something completely worthless. Spore is especially notorious for it's use of different stages, which varied greatly in quality. Instead of getting Pacman+Diablo+Civ+Elite in one, it just ended up as several really subpar clones glued together.

What I would do is to boil it down to something more manageable that can be expanded on later. Perhaps just make a game in top-down 2D, gridbased on a limited area (say 100x100 squares), with some kind of evolution-inspired puzzle gameplay. If you can make that fun, you can release that as a stand-alone game. Then take what you've built (and learned) and add something to the sequel, like increasing the scale in time (volcanoes, erosion, ice-ages), the scale in space (much bigger world), the number of dimensions (2D to 3D, should be easy enough since the gameplay basically remains top-down 2D) or more historical stages (civilizations).

[Pitxardo]

Yes, is a very ambitious game 

Currently, each planet is a grid of tiles, and the game camera inside the planet is a top-down 2D view.
Every tile in the planet is processes to do cellular automaton calculations for water, air, etc... the same thing is going to be use for plants and fauna. One "party of creatures" per tile. As you can see, all the game is tile-based.
In my opinion, until Fauna stage I think the project is affordable with this approximation.

For the moment, the project is 95% programming logic and interactions between tiles against 5% graphics. I'm not focused in graphics, so the game is a bit ugly.

The Civilization stage is going to be more difficult, but I don't what half of the deep gameplay and possibilities of Dwarf Fortress. Something more light than Civilization. This part is pending of definition.

I like the point that it would be a good idea to launch some kind of demo (or private gameplay test) with stages by separate.

Thank you for feedback

[Preece]

Aside from the ill conceived scope of the game, the problem with stuff like this is that while you might make interesting systems, they are not systems that generally involve the player. You usually have to shoehorn player interaction in somehow. If the player is not integral to the core systems of your game, I think that will ultimately be disastrous.

[Pitxardo]

Yes, in my opinion this is the main problem in this game: How to involve the player in the system with a good gameplay.

For example, in Civilization stage, first I thought to only manage some general parameters from the civilization and population itself automatically creates buildings, expand, do wars... Finally, I changed my mind and I will do a more direct control, selecting what to build, what to develop and more things. Something more similar to Civilization series but without controlling units one by one, just giving orders in one position and units will go and do the work. If player doesn´t give any order, units will don´t do anything.