Economy Simulator
Following a massive binge of both the original Elite (1984) and it's successor, Elite Dangerous, I found myself wanting to experiment with developing one of my favourite game systems, which is that of the wandering trader. While it does appear in a few places, the main ones that spring to mind for me are the Elite games. There's something deeply satisfying about filling up your limited inventory space with cargo, and trying to find the right place to sell it for a profit.
It ended up being a little game jam thing I did over a few days at Christmas with my friend Alex. His is undeniably better than mine, but I got bogged down with unimportant things before I got a core loop properly done. By the time I was working on this, I really should have known better, but it was Christmas so I'll let myself off this time.
However, I've actually already started to revisit this project. An idea that's interested me for a while is a menu/text based adventure game that's kind of like if you mashed The Witcher and Elite together. The idea is that you play a sort of generic wandering adventurer type. Not some mystical chosen one on a quest, but more of a fantasy hobo. You're camping out under the stars, trying to earn enough coin for food and generally just trying to keep busy. This is the Witcher influence, except I've turned it up to 11.
The Elite influence is that you can choose to prioritise trading and getting more inventory space, like a horse and cart, so that you can buy and sell more goods to the different settlements. Or you can prioritise adventuring and dungeoneering wherein you'd have to engage with the equipment maintaining mechanics, like smithing in Skyrim, and engaging in turn based battles like in classic D&D. I'm not sure if there are other disciplines I could include to provide more gameplay variety, but I think those two would be the main ones. They both involve the camping and survivalist skills, but vary wildly in how you actually engage with them.
Most travelling would probably be done using a Fallout 1 style map screen, but fundamentally everything would be in some way menu based. I think prioritising content and variety instead of high fidelity graphics and animations is the best route to take through a project like this. The other thing worth considering is that this likely isn't a fun game like World of Warcraft that players would sit down and play for years. It's intended more to recreate the feeling of playing The Oregon Trail during computer classes at school. The sort of thing you have running in the background while you watch an episode of a TV show, or sneakily to play a bit of while waiting for some code to compile.
I realise that what was supposed to be a retrospective of one project has actually turned into a speculative design session about another. That's mostly because the original version didn't have much to talk about, but was the spark which set off this project idea. While I am currently working on this new project, I don't have a patent on the idea. It would be really cool to see if anyone else wants to take a crack at it. If you do give it a go, shoot me an email and tell me about it! I always love learning about other people's projects, and if this gave you an idea in some way, it'd be awesome to hear about.