I had an idea for a game some weeks ago, just as the title says. It would be something like Crusader Kings, it's all about dinasties and roleplay, but set in more modern eras, from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today, or maybe the future, we'll see. And instead of kingdoms, it's all about businesses. It's all about owning global company empires. Being a kind hearted local chain owner, or a sociopathic cutthroat in the 1% that owns the world. Up to you.

And this idea is still stuck with me, and I wanted to get back into game development, so I might as well just try it for fun and see what happens.

I picked Godot, 1) because it's open source, 2) it's going to be fun to see how much it developed in the last decade and 3) it's free, and especially 4) I don't want to use commercial engines and risk being affected by something similar to the runtime fee fiasco

I still have to finish some tutorials and make some simple games to get a grip on the engine and see how everything works, but as a data analyst I already have programming foundations and, I think, this project is monumental for someone like me, but I also think it's doable.

I have a very rough idea of how the code will work for the AI. It will incorporate "ticks" like CK, each tick being a day, and some events fire weekly or monthly, where based on the stats and traits, each individual character will calculate how likely they are to accept or reject that event. This event can be about buying shares, accepting proposal marriages, going on a trip, etc.

My main worry here is if GDScript is good enough to handle "intensive" algorithms. If not, I can always use C#, or C++ if I really have to, and adapt the problematic algorithms.

Another is what would be the best database manager for this, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

As for the world, initially I was thinking about being about the real one, but I realized that I may not want to deal with... Well, accuracies. For example, I don't want these businesses to exist in a vacuum, I'm going to try to make a system that interacts both the world's political events and these businesses. I want to create events, like, a country invades another, which creates demands for weapons, and if you own a weapon factory, good news for you! If you own businesses in the invaded country, well, sucks to be you.

So, I want to do those kind of events, but without needing to worry about things like "Portugal would never invade Japan. What is your AI thinking!?" or "Why is Greece an industrial power house?". If a big studio like Paradox has trouble fine tuning their hundreds of nations in their games, me by my alonesome certainly will not be able to do it.

So I'm thinking just making a fictional world, populated by several countries and empires but not as many as the real world. This way I can fine tune it to my liking and without worrying about being accurate with the real world. This is another challenge by itself, with its own cliffs, but it's more doable.

And so far, that's it. After I'm done with the learning phase, I'm going to start a proper planning phase, lay down some key mechanics and develop a prototype.

I wrote this post as a way to put my thoughts down, double check with myself if the idea is good.

But also, to check with the tildes community if you have any inputs. It can be anything: ideas, suggestions, warnings, problems that you know that I'll face, etc. I'll appreciate anything that you can give me

I've been a fan of the farming/life sim/role playing/cozy games or however you want to label these games since I was a kid and my older brother brought home a new game for the Nintendo 64: Harvest Moon 64. Over the years, I played several titles in the series through the Wii/NDS era, before my tastes changed, and I found myself playing more online games with my friends and just less gaming overall.

Stardew Valley releasing was a huge event for the genre and I do greatly enjoy the game (even though I've yet to finish a play through as I keep restarting after taking a break from playing) as it captured the feeling of the early Harvest Moon games really well. It also got me to start the habit of having an N64 emulator and a copy of Harvest Moon 64 on practically every device I own.

There have been some recent remakes of older games, specifically Friends of Mineral Town and A Wonderful life, but I didn't enjoy the art style and some of the changes made to the games, which ended up with me not picking them up.

I was curious if anyone else was a fan of the series (or one particular game in the series), or if there are any recent games that you felt are great in this genre.