A similar fractal procgen engine to Courier and Eldritch Library, should help in creating those projects (though I doubt I'll reuse any actual code). The item transformation engine should be the one used in Lootopia, which might be useful there, though there's a huge degree of randomness in everything whatsoever.
Text-based.
The game takes place inside a large Fleet of spaceships that surround a planet. The fleet map is on a 2D grid that wraps around on both axises, which approximates a sphere.
Each ship is connected to at least two other nearby ships, which should ensure that they're all connected together -- iirc this is how the dungeons algorithm works in shatterloop. Idk what "nearby" really means in this context, nor do I know how many ships there are.
Ships have various specialized rooms along corridors with multiple floors. Each ship should be quite large and navigation should be hell.
They each have a "Warp Room" somewhere that connects to other ships along the transport route.
Rooms contain random items that can be transformed randomly in other types of rooms. The whole thing is a gigantic sandbox. The names of rooms, their contents and items (and their properties) are all randomly generated alien names based on whatever the language of the ship is (use the forever garden thing here).
The project should be reasonably easy enough to set up and implement due to the lack of actual content or mechanics. It's a good first step towards Lootopia and Eldritch Library/Courier.
Can try to figure out some kind of game goal once the systems are in place. As well as Lore/etc.
Items will get pre-generated and stuck in the appropriate rooms according to a weight chart of that specific room. The actual weight chart calculations are based on the race, as is the number of items that generate overall and other stuff.
Items need a cloud of properties which are manipulable by fixtures, with fixtures pairing an item with a refined version of it. I need to explore how Lootopia does this so it's sufficiently random but interesting enough.
Similarly, some of the property transformations should only happen within the ships of other races.
There should be some means of scanning other ships, probably a specialized handcrafted fixture somewhere in one of the rooms, similar to the warp room. I guess these should be separate rooms that are nonetheless always present on the ship in exactly one spot each.
Each room has a handcrafted scanner room. You don't know which ships contain it (should be at least 1/4 of them) or where it is on any particular ship or even what it's called. Feeding it a refined item will run some kind of useful scan, with the scanner functions/precisions being distributed among races followed by refined items (which should be indexed).
The goal is to find an alien black box and disassemble it down several layers, finding areas where you can insert specific refined procgen items in a space monkey kind of way. The location of the black box is determined similarly to eldritch library and crazy diamonds -- through scattered clues that help narrow it down in handcrafted "Clue rooms". The actual location should be a bit of a fractal -- every single room has a fractal panel so not only do you need to know the ship/section/floor/room, you also need to know additional layers inside the fractal panel. Refined items can be fed into a specialized fixture which each race (again, somewhere though you don't know what or where) contains that will tell you some part of the puzzle to some degree of precision. Tl;dr very complicated fractal mechanic, but a useful goal that uses the wide variety of items and transformative processes available.
With this stuff in place I should be able to flesh out the actual game engine, which is just a text adventure collectathon basically, except with a huge scope, labyrinthine ships and weird alien items. Each seed plays out a bit differently. I can then come up with some kind of basic Lore / UX and complete the project.
The engine should take these various types and invent a bunch of base materials, transformed products and multi-step recipes. It'll then sorta know which fixtures are needed and can distribute them accordingly.
I'll also be able to use the items list for scanning functions / panel fixing / etc.
One caveat of all this is that since there's a limited number of ships, it's possible that some needed item or its fixture doesn't exist. To counteract this, I need a safety system that ensures that the actual required amount of each resource exists *somewhere*. Scanner functions aren't strictly required, but game goal stuff definitely is. I should do safety fixing near the end of the project, as it's related to the actual mapping structure of everything and the finalized systems too.
So, now that I have some kind of idea of how to create navigation hell with Eldritch Library, it's a good time to think about how I want to structure the same kind of engine in Fleet.
It should definitely be different from Eldritch Library's floor plan. Corridors should be more decentralized I guess.
Each ship should be a bit different, based on the Race (with variety).
The same basic structures can apply though, floors with corridors (possibly fractal) that contain rooms or sections. Various types of connections. It makes some amount of sense to generalize Eldritch Library's Layout into layout entities that can then be arranged in various ways in a general "Skein" framework. This kind of work would probably be helpful for Courier as well, or as a kind of open-source kit for gtx0 in general.
