i've been playing around with chicken map concepts recently as well as doing a bit of mucking with different spring mods and roguelikes and minecraft and various things. i've always been a fan of survival type gameplay, as well as open-ended games... play forever, limited by your own skill sorts of games like asteroids or pacman; as well as arcade style survival like rampart.
recently i've seen some very cool, shiny new things for spring like carrepairers donkey kong castle, knorkes starcraft style reclaimable and dynamically placed resources, bobs driveable vehicles, and zwzsgs procedural hexmap.
all of these things together have mashed up and become sort of a concept that i've been thinking about at work for a few days now, i figured i'd post my ideas and see what choo doods think... maybe it's worth something, or will get others interested.
i feel like this idea would address what makes chicken defense a bit boring for advanced players, while maintaining all of the fun that it provides as a survival game-type (specifically, less porc, more units, more reason to roam around and explore)
overview
theme: a small group of colonists crash-land on an unscouted and unknown planet with limited food, building supplies and materials. it's up to the colonists to explore the planet and locate valuable supplies in order to locate sustainance and build shelters, as well as create weapons and structures to survive against an ever-increasing horde of hostile aliens.
in a sentence : game would be singleplayer or co-operative survival mode; somewhat like chicken mode, but with "safe" periods where players reclaim spawned resources CT style
basic gameplay
players would begin in the center of a large spring map with a single "colonist" unit. to succeed in the game, players would have to collect resources in order to build structures to survive against hordes of aliens. players would, over time, gain more colonists, numbers limited perhaps by a farm limit in the way of warcraft games. colonists could be upgraded over time to become specialized healers, soldiers, builders and other more advanced roles.
gameplay would be dictated somewhat by a day/night cycle... possibly of a period of 5 mins day, 5 mins night, where the daytime would be a more "safe" time (thanks minecraft) to send your colonists out to explore the map, harvest resources, and generally avoid the monsters who would stand around and only attack when they spot the colonists rather than spawning and attacking en masse; wheras the night time would be more like chicken mode where monsters constantly spawn and move towards the colonists, besieging them and generally making things annoying.
resources would be randomly scattered around the map according to rarity, and the map would be somewhat-randomly generated by deforming the terrain under map features placed in a grid across the map. players will be able to build structures that will provide renewable resources ... example, a rock of coal spawned on the map would provide temporary resources while a constructed solar panel would provide sustained resources. perhaps a system with several resources would work; "basic" resources such as power and building materials could be gleaned indefintely by building structures, wheras "rare" or "radioactive" materials would have to be located and harvested. map features such as tall hills could be used to the players advantage for renewable resources (CA wind) or lakes (tidal)
the map in my mind is quite large; maybe 20x20 with the colonists and buildings etc roughly the sizes of TA kbots and plants/labs
players from the start of the game would take the first day to build temporary defenses; after collecting some resources such as local flora and rocks, they would construct fencing (a la dragonteeth) and some pewpew lasers with their existing rare material, to survive the first night stage.
more abstract gameplay
ideally it would be the sort of game where in theory you could play forever, but difficult enough that it would be impossible to do so, possibly by endlessly scaling difficulties and numbers of enemies and/or decreasing amounts of spawned resources.
for a food limit in the game, i would use the "farm" model. players could perhaps construct tents to begin with, and then more solid structures like bunkers and eventually armed or advanced structures like arcologies or towers of doom.
players would be encouraged to explore the map and eventually attack alien colonies, because some resources would be rare and reclaimable only, or would spawn only in the wrecks of alien buildings (its funny how i keep calling them aliens, when ofc they are the natives of the planet. anyways.)
base expansion would ideally be by a slow daisy chain, preventing the player from blocking off large "safe zones" early. perhaps as the game progressed, more advanced races of aliens could spawn (like zombie colonists... or spherebots) as well as random giant aliens that roam the map regardless of day/night for added randomness and excitement.
possibly stupid gameplay
bobs vechs in "contact" are amazing. if colonists were eventually able to build vehicles for defense and attack (tanks, etc) as well as scouting (planes and small cars) or even just trucks to bring groups of harvesters into the field, it could add to the complexity and interesting micro.
over time certain colonists could be levelled to become "unique" units, a la GRTS or warcraft 3, with special abilities like dguns or jumpjets or other magical things (chuck noruas!)
existing game resources
we've got chicken mode. i suppose the core game would work similar to that, but with the "safe" periods as described. perhaps "eggs" could grow at the bases, which would hatch and become soldiers simultaneously every 10 minutes or so (in accordance with the day/night and safe periods)
we've got knorkesources, crystals that appear randomly scattered around the map, which are then collected by harvesters.
we've got carrepairers castle, which uses terrain deformation to dynamically align the heightmap to a feature.
we have morph based upgrades and games that use more than 2 resources
required game resources
we'd need some kewl models; obviously chickens exist and spacebugs are in the works, but also some colonist would be required. i like making things, and would make models for this. also, wombat can make some funny creatures and little men, so i'd force him to do it as well.
i -think- i've seen just about everything described in a spring game already, albiet in some cases in different forms...
anyways if you read this far, its only fair that you respond so i can read some of YOUR ideas
So is the "map hijack" mission in 
