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?

When you know more about what it is you like about these games specifically, then a design will start to form.
– Dave Shramek, in a previous comment

Actually, what I liked about those games were the little coherent computerized worlds that they presented. Just about all of these games had wonderful little touches that made them feel more real. Powermonger had the birds that would fly around – useless from a game perspective, but a wonderful little detail. In Syndicate Wars, you can have your agents jump in a car, which you can then drive around the street. You can even have them take the monorail if the city you’re in has one. And of course, there’s the fact that you can blow up every building in the city if you try hard enough.

And now that I’m thinking about this, I remember a short story I wrote in high school about a king who rules a fantasy world where everthing anyone ever roleplays in this world actually happens. The king has a magical miniature diorama of the entire world that he can use to watch as the various adventures unfold, and doing so is his favorite pastime. I think I might identify with the king just a bit 🙂

But that sounds more like a tech demo than a game, so I’m still thinking.

One thing I have come up with, though, is a title for…whatever it is. I’m calling it Planitia, which is the Latin word for “plain” (as in”grassland”, not “unattractive”).