Another interesting reference for combat is Overgrowth.

I thought of Overgrowth when I read this, too. It's still pretty crude, from what I've played (oughta reinstall it, check out the new patches), but the skeleton of the game seems very robust, and I'm expecting some impressive things from it. Even if it doesn't amount to much on its own, I can envision user content filling in gaps. More of a toolkit than anything else right now, it seems.

And that's something you'll have to be wary of when making RootHaven. If you chug through preliminary work and get the physics and the interface and the core rules of the game established, then stall out, you'll be in a tight spot. StarBound, Under The Sea, Space Engineers, Overgrowth, Castle Story, Starforge and many others seem to be stagnating in the framework stages, and many of them have fan content that is far outpacing official development. Minecraft itself stopped well short of stated goals, leaving whole dimensions of gameplay out of version 1.0 and leaving it to industrious modders to fill in the gaps between the vision and the product. Steam Early Access is chock-a-block full of games that have good ideas but never amounted to anything. I know they're still under development, but how many years of "item#3482 texture clipping glitch fixed" update patches before we can declare a time of death?

Are you confident enough in yourself and your team that you can take on the task of building the whole game in a reasonable amount of time? Are you going to wind up in a position like Edge of Space, where you scrap 80% of the game's content after thousands of copies are sold, roll back to square one and start building it again with the rage of your customers echoing in your ears? Are you going to pull a Duke Nukem Forever and keep delaying and restarting and abandoning the project? I've been burned more than once, buying a promising alpha for real dollars and owning a promise that will never be fulfilled. People are wary now, with games like The War Z having made their headlines. It'll be tough to coax money out of people with a rough sketch of your design document and a few screenshots that look like a game they already bought (and in my case, were disappointed by).

You've a man's work ahead of you, any way you slice it. Good luck.

You make a good point sir. I'm not sure how I might convince you or others that my game would be more successful in that respect, and I've been disappointed in the lack of results from other games as well. I wish I had the time to produce something of "releasable" quality, but unfortunately it would simply take too long with the amount of free time I have at this stage in life. My hope is that everyone will be interested enough in the idea to help me give it a real try. Honestly, if I had 8+ hours a day to focus on this I don't believe I would have any trouble creating quality content and taking the game in a good direction.

@cahouthat I think you then need to treat it like a job. Give yourself 16 hours on the weekend and 5 hours during the week to at least give you part-time on it. 16 hours sounds like a lot and if you have a family it is, but if you communicate your plans to your wife (if you are married) and layout milestones and such then maybe they will be OK with it. That's what I did and it worked out great for getting it done.