I like the idea of a crew drifting in the dark for a thousand years.
Personally, I would give the players a budget, from which they design a starship.
This makes the starship "yours" in a way that a generic ship wouldn't be.
Provide some premade options to allow for new players.
The ship design gives the player control over how they want to play too.
More embryo chambers for extra embryos, more food storage rather than food growth capabilities, more nuclear power, or more solar power...
More engines to make the journey faster, more fueltanks to fuel those engines.
All sorts of fun decisions that help to make a game more replayable.
Remove Cyrosleep, and all long term deepsleep options.
Instead allow the player banks of fertilized embryos and implantation options.
This makes the focus on the characters and their interactions more than on just keeping a frozen bank of people alive.
(Although cryrosleep pods would be fun as an option, you could rotate crew in and out of sleep, so they all take a small shift, and all get to arrive at the planet)
Provide libraries that grow skills very slowly, and a teaching skill to impart skills much faster.
This allows for you to train your generational crew, and forces you to try to keep high skilled characters alive to train low skilled children in particular.
Add an apprentice system, so that the children could work with their parents to learn their job on the job.
The primary gameplay loop then goes something like:
- Assign crew to jobs.
- Pick breeding partners and attempt to prevent bad genetic matches. (although you cannot force two partners together, you can generally force them apart)
- OR: Pick genetics from storage and artificially impregnate crew.
- Maintain the systems of your ship.
- Maintain the morale and technical skills of your crew.
- Train new crew as they are born and grow up.
You have events that occur, events have a danger rating, and a value rating.
An asteroid collision for instance, has high danger and high value. Once it's collided pieces remain that you can collect and refine and then use to repair your ship.
We compress time down a little, so that a year is say, 28 in game "days", 1 week per season.
This fits most expectations of time compressed games. And, depending on game speed, allows for the player to pass quiet times very quickly.
You score based on;
- total adult crew upon arrival
- total skills of the crew
- maximum of each skill the crew has
- total resources remaining (if you were to fully dismantle the ship)
- total genetic variance in the crew
- total number of embryos left
This means that about 20 years out from planetfall, the player will want to start spamming all the crew they can.
Since they need to be born from living females, you will want to be growing female crew as much as possible in the years leading up.
(And note while I'm not a stud programmer, I'm at least marginally competent and would be able to do some useful support/feature coding once the core framework is in place.)
