It sounds wonderful, very inventive. I just wish that we could do something like this with more things.
Thanks. The only problem is keeping the systems unique, though.
I hope to make the furnace for smelting iron+coal -> ore and tin+copper -> bronze a guitar-hero like game. Basically, the iron/copper will fall and the coal/tin will fall, and you have to click the right button at the right time to successfully smelt it. I'd probably make it cost at least 10 of each material to play, but you have the potential to make more steel/bronze than that.
As far as forging weapons, I'll figure something out. Maybe I'll make it so you have to click the anvil at the right time for a successful hit, and after three misstrikes you do permanent damage and have to start over with new resources. However, I'm not 100% sure how I would do this per weapon. If there's a sword and a spear and a shield, naturally you need to forge for each of those. But I don't feel like making separate anvils for each weapon, nor do I want to do a million VCE conditions to check for which item the player wants. Fletching would probably be a minigame where you have to click the shaft and then the feathers in that order as many times as you can in 10 seconds. Each game would cost x wood and x feathers. Feathers can be found or bought, unless someone comes out with a bird AI or something that lets them be hunted for, too.
Besides this, I also need to figure out a good resource gathering method. Since the fabrication methods will all be minigames, I don't want to have typical resource grinding to smother that feature out. Going on a previous idea, I could make resources non-renewable, and have a ton of different mines and forests. In mines, you would hit a rock with your pickaxe until it went away, then once you found ore you would keep hitting it until it's done, which would be after x hits. You would tunnel through the mines until you reached hard, unminable rock. Eventually all mines would be spent, so a reset button is a must. Forests, however, can't really be a fun resource collection experience without a script or some serious events.
All of this is a lot of initial eventing and even more complex gameplay integration. Not to mention I'll need to figure out some type of trading system that works and isn't exploitable. This is a lot to event, so I'll probably just get some of the minigames done and post them here or something, since I don't feel like doing a full-on RP of this scale. It also brings up another point: evented RPs can have great ideas, but scripted ones are likely to be more polished, not to mention easier to make if you have the know-how.
I don't know, I guess we could brainstorm some good ideas for making normally repetitive/drab tasks into fun minigames, since that's basically what I just did.
