The genre is hack&slash. The setting is fantasy. You are the hero of your people, a nation ravished by war. In a terrible war, your homeland was destroyed by the beasts of wild, but a small group of your people has survived, and fled east in the last ships of the once mighty fleet. Now you arrive on a new continent, ready to rise again. You are the mightiest hero remaining, and thus it falls to you to rebuild your civilization. Travel the lands in search of mythical weapons and armor to better fulfill your task. Gather resources to help your people expand and start new cities. Defend your people and add to their domain until you have a glorious nation once more. And when the beasts of wild return, you will be ready. Game mechanisms that need explanation. Domain: Your domain is the land of your people. You start with a tiny village, but over the course of the game, you can expand, which leads to new possibilities and quests. People: You start the game with a small group of refugees, but if you gain enough food, your population expands, making you able to expand existing cities, populate new ones or train specialists. Specialists: Specialists, such as carpenters, blacksmiths or alchemists, come in very handy during your adventures. They can perform special services, both for you and your domain. A blacksmith can arm a city guard, or craft a masterwork sword for you. A carpenter can construct complicated buildings or build ships and carts to transport you. Alchemists, with access to the right materials, can create brews that enhance your abilities or cure the sick. If specialists get enough training, their abilities improve and they can create new items. Upgrading facilities, infrastructure or acquiring new specialists is also necessary for more advanced items. Construction: If you have the right resources stored, you can construct new buildings, such as houses, temples or farms. Initially, constructions requires few resources, but as you gain access to new buildings, you need more and rarer resources. Besides buildings you can construct on your own, there are also buildings appearing in the open world, such as farms, mines, temples or even whole cities. If the structures are still intact, you simply need to bring people there to inhabit it. If the structures are damaged, it takes some resources to repair it, but far less than it would take to construct a new building. Resources: Resources are what makes your civilization run, and what is used to create new weapons and armor for yourself. Most resources are acquired through battle, raiding caches of fallen enemies, but there are some structures, such as farms for food, quarries for stone and mines for iron that produce resources as well. Multiplayer: Either build a domain together or train armies to fight against one another. Ever-expanding world: Though a story is set in stone, the world outside the set path is randomly generated, allowing you to extend your empire past your wildest dreams. tl;dr, diablo meets the settlers.
I'm not sure how possible that is, but if I can get it to work, sure. There should be a decent number of quest kinds that can be randomly generated and linking them together in a story should be possible as well. Like there is a randomly generated village, threatened by a random village thread (such as a disease, slavers, a monster or organized invaders). When you complete that, the villagers give you a random information reward quest that applies to the area the village is in (a rare metal has been found at a demon infested mine, beasts of wild are escorting a shipment, there have been rumors of a mythical herbs found at a nearby mountaintop). Still not sure how viable it is and how complicated it can get, but something is better than nothing. Also, sometimes the terrain might generate a special pre-determined location with its own story, such as the mythical city of Plo'rosh, or the heart of the dark woods. And, since I love it so much, there will be a modding program to fiddle with the random world generation and add new terrains and pre-determined locations.
Basically, you run around and kill stuff, not only for sweet armor, but also for resources for your domain. Having a good domain is necessary to advance the story, and it brings other advantages, such as vehicles, trained mounts, blacksmiths and alchemists. A lot closer to settlers than civilization, since it's not vested in diplomacy.
As for the question, it probably would. If you actually did something other than brainstorming. I'd get pissed if none of my ideas ever came to realisation.
Hey, I do a lot more than brainstorming! I write stuff down as well. >.> <.< Okay. Bad excuse. One of the first courses included in the computer sciences university course is gonna be programming though, so I might actually start working on some of the stuff I got written down.
Settlers was the man! Haven't played it since Settlers 2 though and I just found out that we're at the 7th of the series right now, lol
I think I got about a dozen game concepts written down, some more worked out than others. (2 of which I can't actually make because they are sequels to existing franchises, but I just think those two up for the lulz. One is the WoW2, with the questionable amount of single player RPG elements, and something I thought up for an original pokemon game (no new pokemon included)). Shadowangel, circles of hell, rise of magic, the fallen god, unnamed fantasy project, unnamed sf project and this unnamed fantasy project.
I'm about to get my degree in Computer Science and I've worked on many games. I can tell you this, it's not as easy as you think it is and you'll probably never finish such an ambitious project. Such a project takes a team so as to keep each other motivated, as well as lots of time and ability. As for the idea, there doesn't seem to be too much in it that is very unique, and when you are trying to work on an indie game you have to do something groundbreaking otherwise you'll be slightly poking at ground so trodden there's nothing but flat earth left. However, from your description the gameplay doesn't sound bad, just a little bland and overdone. I am greatly excited about the idea of coop in such a game, as nothing like that really exists. This of course takes a lot of technical skill to pull off though, but honestly if you want to do something groundbreaking, maybe capitalizing on the coop part would be interesting. There could be different worlds hosted on servers, and within the servers, people cooperate in running the village, and each have their own controllable hero. That might actually be pretty sweet now that I think about it... Good luck, here's my main advice: Start small! Make your first game something you can FINISH!
You have no idea how true all of this is. I would suggest starting with a starcraft 2 map/mod, a small flash game, or something in gamemaker. What language do they teach you first, drie?
Start working does not equal finishing on my own. I will of course start with smaller stuff than full RPG's. Programming in the first year is both Java and C.
I will kill you all on sight I'd love to read more about you game idea when you have fleshed it out a bit. It sounds promising, I hope you will develop it some more.
