Okay, Planitia. Here’s the basic design I am visualizing.

You’re a god. Your people worship you. You gain mana from their worship, and how quickly you gain mana is dependent on how many of them there are. There are three things you can do with your mana:

• Raise and lower the land. This will give your villagers more space to expand.
• Spend it to teach your villagers new things, like how to build new buildings or how to do certain tasks better.
• Cast spells that either help your villagers or impede your enemy’s villagers.

I was not planning on including direct control of your villagers (though this could change). This would result in a very Populous-style game.

The only problem is that if the base game is growing your civilization with no direct control over your villagers, that’s not really a game. it’s a software toy. To make it a game, there are two options.

The first is to give the player external, computer-enforced goals, like “create 50 villagers” or “generate 1000 mana” or “expand your village to this size”. Since the actual game play will be pretty simple, this may not make for a very fun game.

So we get to the second option. The one where you build up your village so that you can destroy all who oppose you, burn the bodies, salt the earth, collect their souls to offer to your dark god, etc, etc. Option two would probably be more fun. Option two requires either multiplayer or a half-decent AI. Both would be hard to do in 40 hours. So we’d end up with a game with very simple gameplay, but you can play skirmish against the computer and/or multiplayer with someone else over the net.

Thoughts?