This is awesome! This is exactly what I've tried to implement multiple times but got lost in details of how to actually build a market. I'm a huge paradox fan as well if that helps :)
My thoughts were based on this really old niche game called "hard war" in the 90s where a player owns a ship and ferries goods between systems trying to make a profit in between. It gets complicated by the fact that there's rogue agents trying to kill you, cops trying to nab you when you ferry contraband etc.
My thought was to implement something like that with real functioning markets and planetwide events affecting commodity prices with hundreds of planets. It could even have some Stellaris like flavor where different kinds of planets have different resources they need to import just to survive. However I couldn't really figure out what the "fun" bit of game play would be beyond reading game generated news stories and trying to make a profit by running a trade route.
I had a couple of thoughts around putting in a mission tree somehow along with trade routes, automating trade routes and making it about competing corporations (ala medieval strategy games) but didn't get too far w.r.t. how the game mechanics actually work.
To be honest I think it's super easy to get lost in the details, I'm constantly fighting the impulse to do something more than the obvious idea that gets something working and once the pieces come together, I'll be better able to see how things fit together =)...
I've never heard of hard war, but it seems to have that old-school elite gameplay?
In terms of finding the fun, it's hard to say? I believe a lot of that will come down to giving players a decent view into what's going on in the world around them, good ways to interact with the system and making sure that player has interesting things to do.
Automating actions such as setting up trade routes is something I've been thinking a bunch about, I've just got to be careful that it doesn't leave the player feeling like they have nothing to do, factorio and the zachtronics games do some cool things here, but one thing at a time ;)...
I don't have a public repo to be honest, at the moment I'm more fixated on trying to get enough of an mvp together that it feels like a basic game.
It's also all in clojure, which I'm sure someone will tell me is a terrible idea, but it's working pretty well so far and eh, work with what you know =)...
My thoughts were based on this really old niche game called "hard war" in the 90s where a player owns a ship and ferries goods between systems trying to make a profit in between. It gets complicated by the fact that there's rogue agents trying to kill you, cops trying to nab you when you ferry contraband etc.
My thought was to implement something like that with real functioning markets and planetwide events affecting commodity prices with hundreds of planets. It could even have some Stellaris like flavor where different kinds of planets have different resources they need to import just to survive. However I couldn't really figure out what the "fun" bit of game play would be beyond reading game generated news stories and trying to make a profit by running a trade route.
I had a couple of thoughts around putting in a mission tree somehow along with trade routes, automating trade routes and making it about competing corporations (ala medieval strategy games) but didn't get too far w.r.t. how the game mechanics actually work.
I'd love to see a repo if you have one already.