As long as we've got this thread going, I guess I'll share one of my ideas. I've been on something of a human prehistory kick lately, and I want to make a game set in the late Paleolithic era (for reference, this would be around the tail end of what most people think of as "the Ice Age," some 10-24,000 years ago.) I find the whole subject to be absolutely fascinating, and I've been thinking of how much I enjoyed the old MECC games from the 68k Mac era. The classics, like
Oregon Trail, were everything educational software
should be; they were good
games first and foremost, and drew the player into the subject naturally rather than shoving information at him and demanding answers to trivia questions, and consequently they were much more engaging and more successfully educational.
I'd like to do something sort of like that. It would be a sort of tactical RPG/turn-based strategy game, where you guide a band of humans (and/or Neanderthals) around Ice Age Europe, hunting and gathering food, finding materials for tool-making, defending against large predators, and occasionally interacting with other bands (trading goods or knowledge, making war, or even recruiting new members, as the case may be.) The one obvious shortcoming is that in a setting without any kind of overarching civilization, it's difficult to have much of a
plot, but I think it could work in a sort of sandbox way with multiple smaller, independent quests, though I still haven't figured out what the end goal would be.
Gameplay-wise, it would lean more towards the tactical-RPG side of the equation, with a focus on training individual members rather than amassing armies of prefab units. It would follow a sort of
Elder Scrolls model where there's nothing preventing any character from learning any skillset (though not all of them are necessarily going to be equally good at the same things,) but since training takes time, and you have to keep up with feeding, equipping, and protecting the whole band, there's not likely to be enough free time to turn every member into an all-powerful omnimath; all the same, with small group sizes and potentially high mortality rates, it pays to cross-train characters so that the loss of a crucial functionary doesn't leave the whole band crippled.
So yeah, that's basically the idea. If you can picture something like the early stages of
Civilization crossed with
Final Fantasy Tactics, that's not too far off from what I'm going for. This is all still in the brainstorming stage, but hopefully it'll come to something in the not-too-distant future
