Game I am Making: As easy as drinking water

[Seret]

Ah, so I now realise how hard it will be to make this.

Not necessarily. You don't have to replicate reality exactly, you just have to create a game with a fun mechanic that interests people. Take the first stage of the game Spore, the Cell Stage. This was a game where you played as a tiny microbe floating in water. You could swim around and eat smaller microbes, and try not to get eaten by bigger ones. Over time you could upgrade your body parts such as flagella. It wasn't scientifically accurate, but it was a fun little game.

So, Nanomachines make the atoms, trillions of times per second.

Nanomachines don't make atoms, they're too big for that and operate at too low an energy. What they do is carry out little jobs on a very small scale, such as moving molecules around, attaching them to things, detecting things, fabricating tiny objects. Up to you really. I just thought I'd mention it as it's something interesting you could do at nano scales.

I would strongly suggest you read up on some of the basic physics and chemistry of the very small. It'll give you some clues about what you can and can't do in the real world. Your game doesn't have to be completely accurate, but if you do aim for a little realism and get it wrong it'll be immersion breaking for your players.

As for making a star, forgive my ignorance but you'd only have to make hydrogen wouldn't you? Get enough of it and fusion starts up and makes all the other stuff. Hydrogen is the simplest atom there is, convince an electron to orbit around a proton and you're done. Not a lot of scope for gameplay there really. Repeating that a few million million million million times wouldn't really be fun.

Edited October 21, 2013 by Seret

[lajoswinkler]

You know what kind of problems will the OP encounter? Postulate infinite fuel and try to rendezvous and land to Gilly with a tiny probe attached to mainsail engine, or try to reach Kerbol with that ant engine and a large pod.

The world between atoms and macrocosmos can not be comprehended unless we use logarithmic approach. You simply can not use linear one. The gap is just so incredibly vast.

There should be several levels of manufacturing units because if there was only one, either would the progress be incredibly slow, or it would be incredibly fast.

Remember the story about the man and the wheat on the chessboard?

We're talking about unimaginable number or particles here. I'm all for a realistic approach because it's good to use the game to educate people about such things, but it takes more effort than just strategy and core. For starters it needs math, then it needs physics and chemistry.

I'd start from quarks and leptons plucked (you must use deus ex machina, DEM, approach here) from the vacuum which "contains" various fields in which each particle represents a variance in the field.

Stuff them together, you get protons. Combine them with electrons, you get hydrogen atoms. Combine two of them, you get molecular hydrogen. After that, you can either continue with DEM and use your DEM nanobots to fuse them to helium and other heavier elements, or you can make a huge blob of hydrogen and watch it turn into a 1st generation star. Acquire enough hydrogen and time warp until it goes supernova and you get stuff like silicon, oxygen, iron. From then on it's a matter of time before it turns into a 2nd generation star with protoplanets.

Wow, the more I think about this, the more my head hurts...

[shand]

if i was you - start with your original idea - make a molecule of water, that in and of itself would be a highly educational tool and would be a lot of work to develop nicely. then from that point you can take the existing mechanisms and keep on going.

Perhaps something of this nature - in order to use a molecule you have to have made it. so you make a molecule of water, congrats! now you can spawn as much water as you want! want to make some carbohydrates, well you've got hydrogen atoms, so you need to make carbon atoms, make one, and then you can spawn more to create your carbohydrate - now you've make a carbohydrate you can spawn LOTS of that carb!

Assuming you can build in the various interactions at a fundamental principle level theoretically you can then make ANYTHING - but computation power might get challanging.

SUMMARY: make your game as you first described it, if you find you want to develop it further, then go from there.

[lajoswinkler]

Computation power doesn't have to be high. Once the number of units reaches for example 1000, the computer can handle it as 1 kilounit, and so on, mega unit, gigaunit...

It would be impossible for any computer to work with even one mole of units. Avogadro's number might seem innocent, but that's only because of the short way we write it down.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

Update: Version 0.0.1 Is released! Nothing to bug fix, so no download. Unless if you want the epic scrolling game!