This text is a high concept document for a city building game set in a post-apocalyptic world of PARPG. Its purpose is to create a vision of the game, point out some more outstanding features, not to describe the mechanics in every possible detail.
World after a total nuclear world war similar to that presented in Fallout games and Madmax movies. All major cities have been turned to ruins by nukes. Smaller ones were destroyed with conventional means. The population has been reduced by the factor of a thousand or even more. Dust, smoke and soot blown into the atmosphere caused a nuclear winter. In the following years remaining infrastructure collapsed due to lack of maintenance, countries ceased to exist and the world has fallen into chaos and anarchy. The background radiation has gradually fallen to livable levels but remains high in specific areas - near destroyed nuclear power plants or missile bases and in the epicenters of dirty bomb attacks. Biological weapons used during the war, radiation poisonings, mutations and lack of health service or vaccinations allowed both old and new types of plagues to flourish.
People in this world live, or rather vegetate, in small settlements either in the ruins of pre-war cities or in primitive self-built shelters. There is very little, if any, labor specialization and social structure - generally everyone has to fend for himself when it comes to basic necessities. When not searching for food, defending themselves against robbers or robbing others, people are crawling through the ruins, scavenging the junk from deserted houses, stores and factories, hoping that the next day will be a little less miserable.
I envision the settlements in the game to be rather small. The biggest city presented in the original Fallout - New California Republic - had 3000 people and I do not think we are going to top that. The basic gameplay loop of economic games - gather resources to keep your people alive and build new structures and devices that will let you gather more resources - will be in place, although I think we should carefully plan what types of resources the player will be able to acquire and what he will be able to make from it. Here are a few unique features I would like to propose.
This is my "big idea" proposal for the game. Fallout RPGs were about a hero crawling through ruins of the old world to fulfill missions and to gather resources. Fallout Tactics took the idea one level higher and was about commanding a team crawling through the ruins to fulfill missions and to gather resources. Extrapolating that idea even further I would like to finally let the player be the one who sends people on missions (and to gather resources). So the game would be focused on team management - that is assigning right people to performs tasks and equipping them with proper equipment for it.
Let me give you some examples. Imagine that the settlement needs to replenish its food supply. You start assembling a team for that - the simplest way would be to take your best shooter, give him a gun and send him on a hunting. The problem is there is only one rifle left in the settlement and it would come in handy in case of a raiders attack. Perhaps a better idea would be to equip him with a crossbow? The hunt will take slightly more time, but the rifle will stay in the village. Now do you need to send anyone else with him? You could, obviously, send out more hunters to get more food in the same time. However if the hunting grounds are so far away that the travel back and forth would take more time than the hunt itself, then a better idea may be to send someone unexperienced to act as an additional carrier for the game - that way the valuable experienced shooters will be available for other tasks. Another idea would be to equip the team with a cart, so they will be able to travel faster and effectively the whole expedition will take less time.
Second example will be about salvaging stuff from the ruins. This time imagine that you need mechanical parts because some equipment around the settlement requires repairs. Also your mechanic has made plans for a wind turbine, which would come in handy, but it requires some unique parts, like an alternator. Now salvaging stuff is not exactly a difficult task, all you have to do is pick it up and carry home. You probably could send out a few blokes and tell them to bring you some machines - the mechanic will disassemble them at his workshop and get parts for the repairs as well as some scrap metal, electronics and whatever else is there. The alternator is more difficult to get, as the blokes may be too dumb to even identify it, much less to remove it. One solution would be to add some more people to the group and perhaps a cart and order them to bring you a whole small car or a motorcycle. The problem is that this can take a while and you will be diverting people from other tasks. Also ultimately it may turn out that the salvaged vehicle does not have a working alternator. So the alternative solution would be to include the said mechanic into the team - he can find the proper alternator on the spot. Also he may disassemble any other machines and get the needed mechanical parts without having to haul whole devices to the workshop. That way we get much more focused haul on the expense of not having the mechanic available at the settlement at that time. We also risk losing him if the expedition is ambushed by raiders.
A few other possible modifications to team setups include: adding some fighters as guards, adding a Geiger counter to help prevent irradiation, binoculars to help scout for enemies and interesting places, or a draught animal to ease the travel. As you can see, the general idea is that depending on the members and equipment the team may fulfill the missions in different ways and with different results. The player would have to identify the tasks that have to be done, figure out how they can be done and assign right people and equipment to do it. The challenge for the player is in the fact that there should always be more possible tasks at hand, than there are people and equipment available, so the player has to balance out relative importance of the tasks as well as try to use minimal teams to handle them.
Aside from some obvious and typical resources, like food, wood or money the game should include many specifically post-apocalyptic ones. Some examples of these would be scrap metal, mechanic parts, electronics, chemical compounds, medicines, herbs, explosives and ammunition. Another class of resources should be different types of equipment - from weapons (rifle, pistol, crossbow, blowpipe), through tools (axe, wrench, blowtorch, metal detector, cart) to appliances (refrigerator, heater, grinder, hoist) and perhaps even animals (horse, dog, cow).
In a post-apocalyptic world many of those resources, especially tools and appliances, would not be build from scratch but rather salvaged from the ruins and repaired. That is why I think we should introduce a salvaging system to the game and make it the mainstay of the economy. My current vision of the system is based around dividing the technological resources into three groups:
The settlers should be individual RPG style characters instead of generic units. Not only this would make the settlers more individual, it would add more options to the "team construction" system. For example instead of sending the experienced mechanic to retrieve the parts, you could send his apprentice or some "jack of all trades" character who could not construct the whole wind turbine, but knows mechanics just well enough to disassemble machines and to find an alternator. How sophisticated and detailed system would be required is another question, but I think implementing a whole SPECIAL style system would be an overkill that would also overload the player with informations. Something much simpler, like the systems used in Dwarf Fortress or in Majesty, would probably be better. In Dwarf Fortress all the stats are skill oriented, like mining, fishing, cooking, sword fighting etc. and there is no special abilities and base stats like Strength or Intelligence that would apply to many skills. Also the skills improve with use, so the player does not have to manually assign the skill points. In Majesty it is a bit similar, but the skills are more combat oriented and the leveling system is different (but it still does not require player's attention).
With such strong focus on characters we could also lower the focus on buildings. In many economic games building special building types is the cornerstone of the gameplay. I feel that such approach does not exactly fit the post-apocalyptic world with its low specialization of labor. Perhaps a better way would be to limit special building types to defensive structures or industrial buildings (like a wind turbine or a radio tower) and other buildings would be generic type buildings with their function defined by equipment and people inside.
This is a far fetched goal, because it might be difficult to support it right from the start. Freedom to choose your own path of development. Just like the Fallout RPGs were famous for being able to pass them with wildly different characters - from a smooth talker, through a thief, a gun slinger, a sniper or a technician to a heavy weapons lover - so it would be interesting if our game allowed similarly different playing strategies. The player should be able to create settlements as different as a trading hub, technological citadel, thieves city or a raiders base.
An important thing here is that in theory many economic games would allow you to specialize your settlement in one area, but there is no reason to do it because typical winning strategy is to just "specialize in everything". Therefore the game not only has to be designed in such a way that different strategies are possible but also has to make it impossible to specialize in every area at once. One way to do it is through some karma system - if you make your village famous as a raiders base do not expect traders to come there out of their own will. Other way is based on the concept of RPG-style characters and proper game balance - the player should not have enough people to be able to develop the settlement in every possible direction at once.