Inventing a new genre!

I’m focusing on what I view as two major problems:

1. “Research trees” are not engaging, its just a pace-limiting task list that gets shoved in your face every hour or so.

2. “Mini-games” (lockpicking, crafting, etc.) are typically completely disconnected from the rest of the game and block you out from continuing if you can’t solve whatever the game asks you to

What I’m targeting with this game is the research aspect specifically. So the game will come with a bunch of pre-made guns that work fine and you could technically play the game with only those if you wanted to make some sort of hard mode for yourself.

But the intent of this game is that when the player gets bored of the weapons that they have, they will design their own weapons and the game will respond specifically to those designs. And these designs aren’t just something like “+5 DPS” on some revolver, but you will slot components together that each have different trade-offs until you have something like a real world revolver, Fallout 4’s laser musket, or Darktide’s plasma gun.

In an ideal world, I would be able to make an open world game with combat, an economy, factions, etc and one of the playstyles you could do to influence all other systems of the game would be a weapon designer. This game is not that ambitious, but the point is to fully integrate the “side-systems” in games that barely ever get a second thought. This game is just to see what happens if you fully integrate the concept of “doing research” in the game world.

I am planning to have missions that help undermine the enemy (scouting, attack resource lines, capture enemy tech, etc) to help drive the player to want to design specialized weapons. Eventually, I would like to add ‘territories’ and a larger war. This is meant to put pressure on the player to finish research in a timely manner before the enemy moves forward by taking territories and resources away from the player.