I'm currently writing my final year university dissertation. My topic is to do with urban resilience, which basically means the ability of cities and towns to recover/bounce back after disasters and withstand chronic stresses on the system.
As part of the dissertation I need to do something which will increase the impact my project has on society, so to do this I'd like to design a game. I ran the idea passed my supervisor and he seems very keen on the idea. I had initially planned to design a board game, but I don't think I'd be able to make it work.
So my idea is this:
-A game in which players design a city and make decisions which will either increase or decrease the resilience of their city to a specific threat. Ideally some of these decisions will increase/decrease resilience immediately, whilst others can impact a player gradually throughout the game.
-Players should try to improve the resilience of their city to all types of threat(e.g. economic, natural, political etc.). This is because in the real world, focusing on one threat building resilience to one threat could leave you vulnerable to another.
-There would be a knock-out element. Perhaps a massive threat could arise randomly, players with the more resilient cities will survive it but be weakened, players with the least resilient cities will be knocked out of the game.
-The resilience aspect will be numerical and measured by a methodology I hope to develop as part of the dissertation.
I envisage a city-building type game. Collaboration would be optional. Players can choose to work together to improve all of their cities and overcome obstacles, but players wouldn't be able to sabotage the progress of other players. The game would be won by the player with the most resilient city, although I haven't yet thought about when the game would end. I was thinking it could be a last-player standing type thing, but that could mean the game takes too long to play.
It would mainly be an educational game for all age groups, but of course I'd hope it could be played for fun too.
I have absolutely no experience in designing games, but I think I'd be able to learn quickly. I have 3 months to do it, would this be feasible? I'm aiming to create quite a simple game, something that is playable, basic graphics and nothing too fancy.
At the moment this is not much more than just an idea. I'm hoping to get some advice on how I would actually go about doing this. Are there any programmes I can use that will help me? Is there a game engine that is available to use?
I'm a complete newbie so any advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I'll update this post with more ideas as they come to me because I think it'll help me with this process.
Also, if anybody knows of a game like this that is already in existence please let me know. From my research I haven't found anything quite like it, but I wouldn't want to breach any copyrights or anything.
Thanks
