Throwing Down an Idea

While riding my bike around the island, this idea for a game keeps creeping in to my head. I have no idea why it's most prominent while I'm biking.

The idea fostered (flowered?) when DavidTo mentioned that Terarria had NPCs that would inhabit the buildings you built. I thought that was pretty cool, but a bit of research led me to the disappointing conclusion that you could only have a dozen or so NPCs. When I went back to playing Minecraft, I felt all those buildings and roads I constructed seemed eerie and desolate. I thought the idea of lots of custom buildings being inhabited by crude AI would add flavour to my masterpieces.

My Minecraft world kinda feel like this.

I have to admit that I actually like looking at the isometric views created by third party converters of my worlds more than I like actually walking around my world. I guess I have a soft spot for the old school city/park builder games like SimCity, Transport Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Nerd Alert! This is actually my desktop wallpaper.

Resource gathering in Minecraft tends to be tedious after awhile. The fun parts of gathering are searching for the resource, laying out a gathering plan and seeing the effect on the world caused by the gathering. I find the actual gathering to be tedious. The same idea goes for building. Designing, planning and watching the progress of a construction site is pretty fun, but laying down floor after floor becomes tedious. What if that tedious bit could be delegated to underlings? Something like the imps in Dungeon Keeper or the ants in SimAnts.

Who doesn't enjoy expendable minions?

Wrap these three ideas together and sprinkle a few other things that I didn't mention and you've got an isometric, open-world, block-based, whatever builder where your main interaction involves highlighting blocks that need to be excavated and delegating where they are to be placed.  As you shape the world, your work is used by the AI inhabitants. I guess it's like a macro version of Minecraft or something.

There are some other details I was mulling on, including interface, neutral AI, multiplayer and world generation, but I'll spare those for now. I have no idea if I'll have the patience to put even a crude version of this together, but I wanted to throw the idea out there.