I thought of an idea for a potentially fun RTS game. It's based on the FOSS mindset. Think of Sim City where you're building a city, managing it's resources, taxing people, keeping a balance between residential, industrial and commerce zones, providing transport etc. Now put that type of balance into FOSS.
It's easier to lay out the various features in a list than describe them so here goes:
- The CPU controls proprietary companies which have their own cycle just like yours
- Those companies can attack you with patent suits, astroturfing smears, takeovers etc
- You start projects and manage each one's resources
- You can form alliances with other projects
- For each project you can apply your manpower resources to building websites, blogging, forums etc ie "3 people blog for 2 days"
- You can apply that manpower to rebutting astroturfing smears
- That manpower can be applied to bug testing, bug fixing, feature enhancement, UI improvements etc
- You're underlying aim is to gather more users and helpers, who you can task to do different things
- You have to be aware of the public image rating of your project as it can cause people to leave, reducing your manpower abilities
- You can sell your project to other companies, but it always carries risk that you'll lose people if they lack faith in your direction
- Laws will periodically be proposed or enacted which negatively affect your project, so you have to task manpower to lobby govt
- You can start and run various campaigns, and task manpower to picket companies
- New patent applications periodically get proposed, so you'll have to divert resources to looking to prior art, or figure licensing costs / downtime workarounds into your projects
- It's divided into each country, so you have to keep an eye on how well your project is doing in Japan, UK, Indonesia, New Zealand etc and you can focus manpower to raise it's profile in one country at a time
- Your volunteers / users are all listed in each country, who you can divert to local advocacy
- You have to manage both your manpower and money resources, adding servers, replacing equipment, placing adverts etc
- The better your reputation, the more concentrated your buzz is in one area at one time, the more chance you have of being interviewed / profiled etc by a local newspaper, leading to more buzz if you task enough resources to preparing for it
- You have different categories of helpers too, with different skill sets, so you have to try and grow them evenly, no point in a fast growing project that only attracts UI people and no coders etc So when you task X number of people to do X task for X days, you have to task the right people to do it to get good results
- It could be online multiplayer, with other human players and their own projects, the CPU always controls the proprietary companies
- Govt / school / health / police etc taxpayer contracts will periodically come up for tender, so you have to task manpower to submit proposals, attract the attention to decision makers to get the chance to put your proposals
This is just an idea I had a few minutes ago, the list is by no means complete, it's just laid out to give you the general idea. Given some time and brainstorming I'm sure plenty more features could be included. The whole point of any RTS is about an increasing number of plates to keep spinning at once as time goes on. Like all RTS games, every decision has a knock on affect to other things
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