My mind's hovering around a few different ideas, mostly RTSy things. Undecided, need a good night's sleep and see what idea will make the final cut.

Decisions!

I really have no ideas either, brain shock needed stat.

Good luck Mario!

Still haven't started working on anything. We'll see if i want to spend my hard earned vaccation on coding :)

Anyways, the idea that's roaming around in my head so far is as follows:

You are the manager of a generation ship with a crew. Your spaceship has specific areas: kitchen, engines, attack towers, navigation, quarters for reproduction, hydroponics, ...

Your goal is it to reach a planet far away to restart civilization. Along the way you will encounter various obstacles, e.g. engine break downs, radiation leaks, sanitation problems, food shortages, fuel shortages, etc. You have to combat the obstacles by assigning your crew to one of the areas. You can't directly control each crew member, but simply assign n crew to a specific task. Since it's a generation ship, crew members will also die, either naturally or due to one of the problems. Your goal is it to strike a balance between the different tasks.

I'm not sure yet if i want to allow extending the ships #rooms by building stuff. We'll see. I'd like to keep it as simple as possible.

The game is pretty much a 4x in that sense. To reach the planet, you'll have to survive a specific amount of time and get at least 2 crew onto the new planet.

The whole thing will be a top-down view with super low-res pixel art. I hope i can give the crew a bit of a character as well. The biggest issue i see is balancing the whole thing.

That's the plan.

Just back from the car wash for the anual "Get your car shiny so dad doesn't get a heart attack" event. I'll try to structure my thoughts.

Backstory

The empire has fallen. You are captain of a mostly defunct battle cruiser with minimal crew. War changed you. You are sick of fighting, sick of the deaths of the men and women you lead into battle. In your last ambush, you managed to get a hold of jump coordinates to an uncolonized planet. To get there, you need to restore the functionality of your ship and survive long enough to make the jump.

Mechanics

The world consists of a top-down view of your immense ship which is shaped like a pyramid from top to bottom. At the top of the ship, you find the bridge, where the captain monitors all ship functions and crew. With your minimal crew, you restore parts of your ship step by step until it's fully functional to make the jump. You have the following tasks:

• Restore the ship by restoring power and building rooms
  • Reactor chambers. These power an area surrounding them, allowing to build other rooms
  • Matter chambers. These gather material from surrounding space used to construct rooms and provide resources for cloning
  • Crew quaters. The number of quarters puts a limit on your maximum crew
  • Hydroponics kitchen. These produce food. The number of hydroponics puts a limit on your maximum crew
  • Cloning lab. Your crew has no time to make love. This is how you create new crew
  • Research lab. Increases your shield and weapon power. They will also unlock new room types
  • Battle stations. The more stations, the better you can defend yourself from external menaces
  • Security stations. Man these to defend against enemies that boarded your ship. Security stations only cover the area around them, so strategic placement is important
• Assign crew to the various rooms you build. Only manned rooms are functional. Assignment works via selecting a crew member by a left click, then left clicking the target room. I want a bit of micro management. Assigning multiple people to a room will increase its output.
• Defend against internal and external problems. These occur randomly such that you're always busy :) A few examples
  • Space pirates/aliens/... can board your ship and wreck havoc and kill crew and destroy rooms. Use security against them or play a mini game
  • Other space ships may attack you. Use battle stations or play a mini game
  • Navigate asteroid/mine fields mini game
  • Rooms may randomly break, because your crew are dorks. Fire in the kitchen!
  • ...
• Reclaim rooms. In case of resource shortage, e.g. because all matter chambers are destroyed, you can reclaim the materials used for a room and build something else.
• Train your crew. Each crew member is an individual with a name and experience. The longer a crew member is assigned to a specific room, the more experience they get doing whatever they do there.

Once the entire ship is powered up, the game is won.

If all crew dies or there aren't any more resources left, you lose the game.

Atmosphere

The game will features cut scenes that introduce new features once they are unlocked. It starts off with the minimal crew on the bridge. The captain explains what's happening next and assigns crew one after another to the basic rooms.

Crew will take on room specific uniforms once they entered the room. Can you say red shirt?

Crew will also document their doings with little speech bubbles. I hope to come up with a metric ton of one liners.

Sound effects will be mostly chip tunes, except when crew dies :D

Graphics will be whatever i can do with my non-existant pixel art skills. I hope to add a little lighting engine to make things look a little more interesting. Non-powered areas will be hidden behind a kind of fog of war. Powered rooms will illuminate accordingly.

Welp, after throwing away my initial tile set and sprites. I settled on the following. On-wards to map generation! Which i'll fail at! Cause auto-tiling is hard!

Nice use of pixen, it's a nice & simple app, but im pretty bad at using it effectively :). And yeah i could never understand automapping in tiled.