Shipwreck Survivor - the Idea behind

(This is a copy of my original post on reddit)

Hello everyone,

I wanted to let you know that I have started a little project.

At first I want to say that I am not a programmer or developer or some kind of that, I am just a dumb script-kiddie - even that I am a grown adult. I can read some code, but I cannot really write (except a little bit of JS). But when I was a kid, I tried programming in BlitzBasic (BB).

Last weekend I somehow got a nostalgic trip and looked up if the old BB community I was in still existed.

Sadly, I read that Mark Sibly - the creator of BlitzBasic and other languages - had died. This was a bad news that made me sad.

But I also read that BlitzBasic became OpenSource and someone did some patches and seems to maintain the project. If you want to check it out, here is a link: https://blitzresearch.itch.io/blitz3d

Because I always wanted to make a little incremental game and honor Mark Sibly and the healthy community around BlitzBasic (There's so much going on, many different projects have done cool things lately, but I'll get to that later. And BlitzBasic is definitely not dead! YAY! \o/) I started a project called Shipwreck Survivor.

The plan:
- The theme is that you are stranded on a beach. Your goal is to get rescued by building things like big stone signs and big bonfires. - You have stats like health, energy, hunger and thirst that you can level up. there are also skills that go up when you do an action and level up, making task results better. There are also resources (bet you guessed it ;) ) - And different actions like exploring, gathering, eating, sleeping and so on. - The game is designed to be more hardcore and will rely heavily on clicking (not fast!) and not idling and just giving spare resources and making it very tedious. later there should be the function that an action can run a certain number of times again and some idle income )
- Because I want to make it hardcore, you can also die in this game. This will be the prestige feature. You will keep your character level and/or skill level (I will decide this later while balancing). This will make the next run easier. There is no story planned like Groundhog Day or something that explains why you start over, just pure game mechanics.

-What exists:
Not much to show, I spent the last week creating the basic structure of the code and a lot of time researching and reading about how things work in BB. I had to rework some things I wrote because I realized that I was thinking too modern and that BB is really basic. On the other hand, I made some good progress, which makes me hopeful that my plan will work the way I designed it.

At the moment you can collect things and get XP and resources for it.
There is no real GUI at the moment, just for testing purposes.
It is frame-based during the prototype phase with 5 frames per second at the beginning. This will (maybe) be changed to a time based system. But that will be in beta.

And to add to this: I am currently using the vanilla BB directly from the link I shared above. It is really simple and I think it adds to the hardcore part of the game that I intend to do. Back then I was using an IDE called IDEal which had BB support.

Using BlitzBasic means that the game will probably only be released for Windows.

But I said above that there is a lot going on in the community and I found a tool while searching that someone made that converts BB code to JavaScript. So maybe there will be a web version.

Stages planned:

- Prototype: Set up complete background and features for most including:
-- some of the actions -- Skill system
-- stats system

- Alpha: Everything to make it something you can call a game like:
-- Options -- Save/load system -- Starting the story event system
-- and reworking the code

- Beta: Make GUI and everything, fix bugs, write more story, maybe add some smaller features I did not think of yet.

- Release

Now to the feedback part:

Since I have no real GUI at the moment, I want your feedback on what you think could be cool. I see 4 options, maybe someone has another idea:

Text based keyboard input: Like the old days, you get a bunch of choices and type a number to make your choice. The style will be more ASCII-like. This will probably be the easiest and make the planned beta phase a lot less work). This means it will not be a clicker but a keypress game XD

Text-based mouse input: Like above, but I will make buttons to click.

Custom GUI: I will make a GUI with colors and maybe some pictures, it will look more "modern" (I am not a graphic designer!) This will be a lot of work.

Premade GUI: I will use escapeGUI or mGUI to create the elements. Will probably look the best, but I hope they will not cause bugs because they are old. And there may be issues with crediting or if they need plugins as it is with the legal stuff there. but will be fun to do.

That is it, if you get to this point, thanks for reading, I really appreciate it and I hope for good input and feedback.

Thank you very much!