Hey, Here's an Idea...

I had come across this idea in another article (read "industry flame") called A Gamer's Manifesto.

Where's the game where we're a castaway on a deserted island and the object of the game is to find food and clean water and build a shelter, a game where we can play for one month or six months, because whether or not we get rescued is randomized? Where every time we restart we get a different island with different wildlife and vegetation and water sources?

Well, I think it's a rather good idea. It's nothing terrible sophisticated, at least on the surface. Here are the complicated bits:

• Animal behavior
• Weather
• Time passage
• Physical wear and tear on the user's "body

Not to say this is an easy to do thing for me. I've no experience with computer games. This seems like a really good place to start. I'd need to up my C++ skills, maybe work on some artistic skills, learn some new tools, that sort of thing. I would really like to script things in lisp, though. Not sure why, but it just seems like a really good language to script AI (for the animal behaviors).

So far in the mentions of the idea that I've had, there's been a few positive responses. I think the appeal of a game like that is the tomogochi-type game addictiveness. The game would involve the survival of an avatar, but from a first-person perspective. I think that adds a bit more to the addictiveness, in that it is about virtual survival of self.

It might be pretty interesting.