It started as a sandbox for my Lua scripting, and it's rapidly turning into a game in its own right. The setting is going to be S/F set mainly in the asteroid belt. Women are going to be fairly rare, but then the PC is going to have access to a cloning machine, so he'll be able to design grow his own females, although he'll still be somewhat dependent on getting dna samples to sequence. It's also going to have a stronger plot than WM, with more structured interactions, although I plan to have a sandbox mode as well, for those who just want to look after their pretties.
Apart from the setting, the big idea behind this is to shift the bulk of the game code and data over to Lua and XML. This means that the C++ code is just an engine handling graphics requests, and all the game content is in files that can be edited with notepad. I think there's a lot of folks out there who'd love to do a bit of modding, but can't get past the learning curve of C++/SDL/Visual Sudio and all the rest of it. My hope is that this will make it easier for folks to get started.
There's a couple of other things I'd like to try, since I'm reinventing wheels. In particular, I'd like to fiddle with the time handling. I'm going to have to anyway, since I want to allow for travel times in the solar system. What I'd like to do is have things work in real time. Well, real-ish, anyway. I'd like to have the game run on with a number or preset speeds. The player could handle events personally, ignore them (usually a bad idea) or trust whoever he left in charge to deal with things.
Finally, if i can get this halfway right, I'm hoping we can use it for the basis for WhoreMaster 2.0. The big problem with ading Lua to WM is that I need to write a game's worth of code to make the game data accessible from Lua. If I'm going to do that, it's not much more effort to reimplement the game logic in Lua and have all the data in Lua format to begin with, which is how I got started on this idea.
Anyway, that's CloneMaster in a nutshell. It'll be a few weeks yet before I have anything playable, and when I do it's going to have a limited feature set. But I am hard at work on the project, work and wife allowing
and I hope to have something for you before very much longer.
