This project should be scope-locked. It definitely has some shatterloopian stuff for added immersion and gameplay, but these systems have technically already been built. I don't want Lore or a Game Goal.
The main focus of the game should be on Enhanced GTT-style Combat. Any other gameplay system just enhances that. It should therefore be fairly easy to set up the peripheral systems, as the real work is going to be in environmental design and overall combat mechanics.
Combat is heavily enhanced -- there's things like height to think about (which can be adjusted depending on the environment), various things in the environment that can be used, and a wide variety of weapon choices, equipment and various types of consumable. NOTE: The combat engine I'm working on with the maze would be perfect for this game.
Areas are laid out in "arenas" -- a series of rooms that go around in a circle (known as a "perimeter") with a central room known as the "core".
The perimeter contains smallscale enemies, easy environment stuff, and various things relevant to the region that can be collected and used in the crafting system. You can occasionally find equipment and stuff too.
The core has a boss, which is a harder version of one of the smallscale enemies. Beating it gives you a Life Node, which increases your health, as well as a Key.
Regions have a Warp Node at their origin that goes to the Bunker -- here you can store items you've collected, craft stuff, and swap out equipment. If you've found the Portal Node in a new region you can also warp there directly from here.
Regions are connected to other regions along the perimeter via locked doors that keys can open. New regions will have a Warp Node somewhere around the Perimeter that you can activate.
Boots -- Boots enhance your speed and/or your ability to walk on rough terrain of various types (like ice, mud, shallow water, etc). Some will allow jumping to increase your height or jump onto small platforms rather than climbing (which takes more time).
Armor -- Armor changes your defensive ability against various enemy attacks. It can however also slow you down.
Visor -- Your visor allows you to see various things at a distance, basically a kind of scanner. Different visors do different things. Some are better at seeing enemy stats, some are better at seeing the environment or whatever.
(Dominant) hand -- If you're right-handed this will be your right hand, you determine this at the beginning of the game. Anyway this is the slot for your main weapon.
(Off) hand -- your other hand. This can be another primary weapon, but it'll make you lose speed. It can also be some type of shield or a smaller weapon, all of which are a bit different. Big shields may cause speed loss.
Ranged -- You can carry a ranged weapon such as a bow or blowgun with various types of consumable ammo. Large versions of this will deal more damage (or have better range), at the expense of speed.
Belt -- your belt will allow you to carry various consumable items, with different belts allowing different amounts of each one, or even enhancing them.
Backpack -- your backpack allows you to ferry materials. Some are better than others in various ways. Some will also slow you down in various ways according to how much is inside them.
The items system shouldn't be limited in any conceivable way -- you should be able to manipulate literally anything in the environment, provided you have the right Tools for certain things (Tools count as weapons so take up one of those slots). So the key is building engaging environments, which will be fairly fun and will also help inform games such as Drifter.
Crafting recipes are fixed to the region and are procedurally-generated from the materials therein, with the seed dictating different combinations. In order to craft region-dependent items you need to place a crafting station of that type in your bunker -- you can construct one from common materials found in that region.
Equipment (save for the Belt and Backpack) and Tools are a bit different -- their properties come from manipulating metals. There's a free system for altering metal properties a handful of ways, as well as creating alloys and melting those items back into their constituent metals. These fixtures require them being crafted and placed as well. Should be fairly shatterloopian in format and allow for emergent combinations via experimentation -- metals have different properties that dictate the resultant item and also can enhance or detract from one another when alloyed, with cutoffs for those dictated at the percentage of the overall alloy. Should be fun to explore the system here.
In addition to gathering materials from the environment, you can carve them from enemy corpses or do wait-based fishing (depending on the Rod and also obviously a water source). Very shatterloopian overall.
Place items in your backpack into your Storage Node. Your base storage is available anywhere in your Bunker, and it's limited but can be upgraded infinitely by crafting and placing Storage Modules.
Use the Constructor (found in each Room) to create new rooms that attach to the existing room in the ways that you describe. Construction requires Energy, with better rooms requiring more in an exponential way. I'll explore Energy mechanics in a bit but it's a straight import from Shatterloop.
You can also connect the current room to another arbitrary room in the way you describe -- this also requires energy, though not a whole lot. Rooms can connect in tesseract-like ways, no limits.
Use the Fixturizer (found in each Room) to create new fixtures from base inventory. This requires materials but not energy. Fixtures get virtualized and their virtualization space is infinite.
Place fixtures in the current room. Rooms definitely have fixture limits, though you can get around this by constructing rooms with higher limits (though this costs exponentially more energy).
Energy system
The energy system is a straight import from Shatterloop:
The Boiler turns plant products into basic energy.
The Fuel Refinery turns various crafted or gatherable items into alternate energy sources, which can be put in the boiler to generate more energy. The tree is similar to shatterloop -- animal fats, coal, potions, uranium.
Greenhouses
Greenhouses allow you to Farm plants (or mushrooms, etc) of any kind -- the caveat is that each greenhouse room has to have properties that are favorable to that plant. There's some overlap -- plants in the same region will definitely have overlap, but there may be overlap beyond that. Plants are farmed in real-time and auto-harvest and auto-replant so they're not cumbersome to work with. However the farming only happens while you're playing the game.
Research Station
Various features are stuck behind Research gates to not overwhelm the player -- this game is a lot simpler than shatterloop however so there's a single Research Station fixture that lets you research.
