I've been fermenting a few ideas for a game built in the minetest engine, and I wanted to present a few of the more interesting ones here in order to gauge response, generate feedback, and finally decide to which one I will commit (as you'll see, each of the projects are rather too ambitious for me to pursue all of them at once).
"Tooth and Nail" : (originally intended as part 1 of a two-part series)
An extreme survival game in which the player literally starts from sticks and stones and must work constantly to eke out an existence in a harsh and ambivalent wilderness. Planned features include:Lao Tzu wrote:“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.”
- A complex and complete "ecosystem", based upon a phagic network of plants, pollinators, herbivores, predators, scavengers and decomposers - most of which have the potential to be both pests and pets.
- Multiple threats to survival : injury, suffocation, exposure (hypothermia), dehydration, starvation.
- "De-buffs": blood-loss, exhaustion, infection (fever), sickness.
- A "collaborative hardcore" game-mode, in which all players on the same server form a "tribe", working together in order to ensure survival. In order to re-spawn, another living player has to be able to rescue you (by activating your bones). If everybody wipes out - game over - the map file is deleted and re-generated.
Spoiler
A hidden narrative (found through the discovery of modern ruins, technology, and archives), discribing how, several decades prior to in-game events, Mankind has literally nuked ourselves into the stone age.
In contrast to "Tooth & Nail", "Blut und Eisen" is a PvP gang war, in which the object is to force the opposing faction's capitulation, or eradication. The simplest permutation of this game would be to evenly and randomly sort players into factions on a randomly-generated battlefield, and just let them have at it. Over and above that, features could include:Sun Tzu wrote:"The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of enquiry which can on no account be neglected."
- "King of the Hill", a simple, skirmish sub-game, in which one faction must defend a fixed point from the other.
- "Strategic Hamlet Initiative", in which factions must secure and defend a majority of neutral villages (and/or villager NPCs) for a given period.
- "Pax Coloniae", in which one faction is greatly outnumbered, but possesses a significant technological advantage (e.g. chariots, steel, crossbows, gunpowder, etc.).
- "Byzantium", in which, in addition to fighting open adversaries, each faction also possesses one or more hidden "turncoats", whose purpose is to sabotage them from within.
- Each player could lead a small "unit" of NPCs, whose purpose would be to protect the player and lend additional fire- and man-power to offensives. The size of this unit could reflect its leader's running kill/death ratio, or how how many NPC villagers he has "liberated", or how many villages his faction controls, or some other factor I've yet to consider.
So, umm, yeah. These are what I'm currently thinking about. All comments and contributions are, of course, welcome.