So, is there a story line for the game developing? Based on screenshots and your description of it as a survival game, tt feels kinda Goblinson Crusoe to me

Yeah, I'm kinda fleshing out a scenario where you are an apprentice goblin wizard teleported into the wilds by your master to continue your apprenticeship by not dying. You have to travel the islands to find food and raw materials to survive and to build the things you need to continue learning magic. I've got a crafting system in the works, that's very Horadric Cube-ish: ie, you drop in a stack of wood and a chunk of volcanic rock, hit the button, and out pops a limited-use wand of fireballs. Something to that effect. As you advance, and gain knowledge, and obtain access to more and rarer materials you can build more powerful 'Horadric Cubes' (I'm calling them workbenches, although not all of them are benches) that enable more powerful recipes. So far in my plan, power advancement is 100% equipment driven, no experience levels or permanent upgrades to your character. It would be entirely possible, through extreme stupidity, to lose everything and have to start from scratch with your starting equipment: a basic Drawing Board and maybe a Wand of Warm Puffs of Air. (Hard Mode anyone?)

Goblinson Crusoe FTW. Props to yckx for that one.

Trouble with this whole procedurally generated, open-ended game stuff is that you end up feeling like no matter what you do, there is only more of the same to come. Progression through something requires structure for me (but then WOW bored my tits off).

Biggest challenge in my project is making levels. You can make them by typing something and pressing enter. Use that to tell a simple but interesting story. Too much freedom can lead to disinterest.

Just my 2c.

Yeah, that is definitely true, to a certain extent. My problem with procedurally generated systems is that so often the procedural system is the whole point of the game. The designer just makes a big sandbox, and despite all the hype, sandboxes to me just aren't fun after the first couple hours. For me, the key is to provide the same kind of structure and even narrative flow that you can get in a packaged-content game. That's hard, but I've got one or two ideas that I'd like to play with.

1) A lot of sandbox games don't provide a goal, or push you toward that goal very strenuously if they do. I think that even in open games, there needs to be a goal, some kind of "win" condition. In the case of Goblinson Crusoe (which, yeah, really is an awesome name; kudos yckx) that win condition is "become a master wizard." This could possibly be accomplished by building a master-level artifact, or by defeating a master-level wizard. Survival just for the sake of survival gets boring.

2) A lot of open-world sandboxes rely on emergent behavior for their entertainment. Emergent behavior is cool on a certain level, but doesn't really scratch every itch. In order to provide a narrative flow, there has to be something controlling that narrative other than just the rules of a complex system. Some sort of director, making things happen. Has it been awhile since the player fought a big battle? Have the director stage an attack on his home camp. Stuff like that. I could have the director keep track of current time spent in the game, or current distance from "home base", and scale encounters accordingly. This one could be an interesting challenge to try to implement.

3) Reducing the feeling of "sameness". This is a hard one to do, and takes a lot of effort. Different tilesets, different island layouts, etc... can go a long way toward helping here, but all those take work. Different encounters set-up by the director can help as well. The director can build special islands to provide an extra-special challenge: maybe an island occupied by a human fort and patrolling human soldiers, or a pirate cave haunted by ghosts. This hinges on a complex and thorough world generator, but I think this task is made a bit easier in that my islands are discrete levels, basically unconnected or unrelated to neighboring islands, so I don't have to worry so much about the neighborhood and making things "fit" together.

4) Long-term expansion and tweaking of the game, continually adding features over the life-cycle of the game. Kind of like how Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are always under development. The anticipation of new features can keep people on the hook for awhile.

On rare occasions a muse whacks me with her board-with-a-nail-in-it of inspiration.