[gameidea] The Miracle Engine

the world's over, and has been for a while. no one has any idea what caused this, or even when. there's some hope of rebuilding, but at the same time it's extremely demoralising being forced to start from scratch.

while foraging, you find something very intriguing. something that blends in with the surrounding rubble, but seems to have a faint "glow" to it. technology is incredibly rare nowadays, so you rush over to pick it up - noticing pretty quickly that the glowing thing is an orb of sorts with the word SEED etched into it. you go to touch it, and immediately get knocked out.

it takes a while before your eyes open again. it takes another while for them to get used to the darkness surrounding you - save for a single faintly glowing screen floating infront of you which has just one word on it:

LOGIN

having nothing else to do, you reach out for it - and immediately it switches to another screen, this time faintly red.

[GENESIS PORT] OBSTRUCTED. RECYCLE BLOCKAGE?

you spend a couple of seconds thinking over if it makes sense to do so, before realising that it's highly unlikely that something called a "recycle" could make the current situation any worse. then it hits you that you could be the "blockage" that gets recycled, which provides a few milliseconds of hesitancy before you remember that the world is over and you kinda don't care.

so you press the button.

the space you're in rattles a bit, and some sounds start echoing around you. it's surprising, but it's also quite gentle - and more importantly, the screen has changed again to show quite a bit more things now. an audit log with only 3 items on it.

• [PENDING] restore [COUNTER] subroutine. [missing [ENERGY]]
• [NOW] recycled [GENESIS PORT] obstruction; gathered CONCRETE, IRON, STEEL, [ENERGY].
• [??? ago] [history wiped]

...before it immediately goes back to the OBSTRUCTION prompt.

this is exciting, and it seems like there's some chance that this thing can help get the world back to how it was. that excitement quickly curdles into anxiety, as you remember that you have no assurance of it, that this thing was found amongst a whole bunch of rubble, and that you're seemingly inside of it - despite its appearance showing that it'd likely struggle to fit anything bigger than a dog.

this is basically the idea for a game i'm thinkin of. i have no game dev experience and there's a lot of room here, but my thought is that you're building up resources, and slowly rebuilding this "thing" that seems completely alien were it not for the fact that it had english words on it. you'd then build off of that, synthesizing raw materials into bigger things, doing research, unlocking features, etc...

the other part of my idea is that you'd have CATACLYSMs which occur as you gain more and more resources - almost like something notices and tries to intercept. CATACLYSMs would deal sharp debuffs to your rate of input, and the "thing" has to fight them off. luckily it's got a pretty solid self-defence mechanism, but unluckily it's pretty slow and requires a bunch of resources. so the way you fight against a CATACLYSM is by manipulating all the options you have available to sustain the thing and move resources into the self-defence protocol before time runs out. failing to do so will activate the failsafe, which destroys various parts of the thing, but sends you back into the past to retry it again.

the biggest blockers to this are like. well firstly i have no experience in game development, and no experience in music. but honestly what im thinking is that at the very least i can work on the introductory section since that's pretty simple, and reach the first CATACLYSM to implement its presentation. i want the thing to be sleek, and function pretty similarly to games where you manage complicated networks of automation, except challenges may pop up that force you to approach certain things differently