I plan on having it so you build your own world from scratch, terraforming, plantlife, animal life, and then civilisation, but, kind of the reverse of how Spore works, they work by building up from the cell stage to the space stage, I want to hand people a ball of clay and say "make a world" at the start of the game. They start the game with the terraforming, not when they reach the 'space' stage. Then they add all the plants with a brush tool like they would with a map editor, and everything else the same sort of way a map editor works, but making it like the sims where you have a catalogue, you need to earn currency to get the cool stuff, which is where the objective is added to the game, earn money, make a world to your tastes. Now when you are happy with the world you make, like sim city, you cannot return to the terraforming stage, not without destroying any civilisation you have built.
The stage after building the world allows you to start a new civilization, this will be simply humans to begin with, I will think about alien species and things like that when I have the basics down. You build like you would in Age of Empires, but this time you are one of the people on your world, you inhabit the homes, you can go get a job, like you can in any RPG game such as Oblivion or Fable. More similar to Fable where you can go to a shop and offer to do things, like a pub you can go fill pints of ale for customers, blacksmiths you can make weapons, you get the idea. Since you built the world and everything in it you have the title of king/emperor or whatever you want to be called, this means everyone on your planet will follow you, of course if you are evil and kill them for no reason they will rebel, or maybe a group of civilians will leave and create their own settlement in another area of the world. You do not get god like powers when you enter the civilization stage, you are one of the people and can only do what they could do, so you would have to build a military force to defend against enemies such as those rogue settlements.
During this stage you can re-enter the city build mode and add to your settlement, new buildings present new things, like an academy will provide research, reasearch will then progress your civ through era's, changing the look and abilities of your buildings and people, allowing you more options. The starting Era will be very early civs, a bit like AoE you choose which civ, all eventually lead to similar appearances, if you chose Egytpian of course your main building will be a Pyramid, which is where you enter city-build mode and control anything major like military and the like. Anything you do will in turn give you currency to spend on new objects and features, such as new buildings, and eventually when you build a experiment lab (one of the later era's) you will be able to engineer creatures (from a set library) and release them into the wild, this could cause multiple things like the ecosystem changing entirely because another creature is hunted to extinction or it could cause the world to flourish and bring new animals into existance.
I plan to release this as either a free game or at least free to play, I intend on having a multiplayer part of the game, a bit like farmville where you can visit other peoples creations and have them visit yours, but more in depth as they will be visable to you, and you will be able to do things in their world, maybe kill people (of course to make it fair the owner of the world will have to give permissions to do things like this). This means the game could potentially be an MMO style, where many people can go to the same planet and interact with eachother, possible leading to public worlds which are safe from tampering from players and maintained by me and any others interested in being an moderator when the game reaches that stage. I know the Unreal engine can handle this to a certain extent.
Im droning on a bit, Ive probably mixed around bits and made things confusing for people to read, but any questions Il be more than happy to answer, if anyone has any ideas they would like to add then be my guest, I think I covered most of the stuff here, I will release more detailed information about anything if asked but I think I detailed it enough.
This is all concept at the moment of course, Im hoping the Unreal engine can handle this, according to their FAQ on the website it can, they say it can do whatever you want it to. I may move to another if I find a better option. Im playing with the engine using tutorials from youtube for now and so far its looking like a good choice, havent looked at the coding yet or how to get it to switch views or anything but I expect this game to take a year at the very least to get to a usable state, especially with just me doing it.
I know theres a separate part for recruitment, but Im not specificly asking (yet), Im more just saying if anyone wants to help then let me know what youd like to do and what you are able to do, such as what software you have used before, or want to use, I cant judge since Ive literally just started using UDK.
-Nero
