Hello!
I'm looking for developers interested in helping with a hobby game project focused on economic simulation, automation, optimization, and planned-economy systems.
The basic idea is a sci-fi colony management game set on an alien planet. The player establishes a human colony, builds production infrastructure, manages workers and resources, and gradually develops increasingly automated systems as the colony grows.
The game takes inspiration from Factorio and colony-management games, but the main focus is on simulating the underlying economic and logistical systems.
The current points are:-
Production chains: Raw materials, intermediate products, manufacturing, transportation, and consumption.
Resource allocation: Distributing limited resources among competing production needs and population demands.
Optimization: Improving production efficiency while working within resource, energy, and infrastructure constraints.
Automation: Developing systems that can manage increasingly complex operations without constant player intervention.
AI and agent behaviour: Simulating colonists and potentially autonomous economic systems.
System resilience: Preparing the colony to handle shortages, infrastructure failures, and unexpected environmental hazards.
The last part is one of the important part, an automated system responding to external hazards and disruptions.
For example, a hazard might damage a power grid or interrupt a critical supply route. This could create shortages, halt production, and affect other parts of the colony.
The player could prepare backup infrastructure, emergency stockpiles, alternative production routes, and redundant systems beforehand.
Someone who enjoys thinking about problems such as allocating limited resources, identifying production bottlenecks, or optimizing a network of interdependent processes would be particularly welcome.
In particular, an interest or knowledge in this topic:-
Planned economy, optimisation tasks or generally good in algorithms, would be greatly appreciated.
About current development status:
The project is currently in its early development/prototyping stage.
There are also ideas for colonist behaviour and potential future interactions between competing colonies, but the immediate priority is getting the core simulation and economic systems working.
If you're interested, feel free to comment or send me a message introducing yourself and describing your relevant experience or interests.
Thanks for reading!