Initial project launch!

If you've found this devlog, then welcome to Last Frontier!  This will help serve as a record for the work being accomplished and help drive the game forward.  I am currently in casual development of this game, as I am also taking care of my new baby and working on Ph.D. work.  So why start now?  Well, for months I've mulled over a challenging thought project:

How can you create a game which:

• Creates unique experiences for each player without shoehorning players in preset directions
• Allows players to actively impact the world around them
• Provides consistent explorable/unknown content (is "wiki-resistant")
• Can be played casually as well as actively
• Is fun and fair!

And the reason that I've started this devlog now is, I think I have an answer!  Significant planning and development of basic and advanced concepts has led me to decide that the only way to move forward is to start implementing!  That being said, for the sake of convenience (and suspense), these logs will address these concepts as I begin to implement them.  For now, what you have to look forward to is:

• A world with procedurally generated wildlife and ecosystems
• An evolutionary algorithm which can track player impact on wildlife and have it directly affect the natural evolution of the species
• Resource drops with RNG tables tied to these auto-generated wildlife, resulting in MASSIVE variety in potential drop quality/attributes
• A crafting system which allows slotting of many various resources as well as the option for automatic or manual crafting
• A procedurally generated landscape that is near infinite
• Many different groups and factions that you can work with (or against) to impact not only the environment but the life of the frontier "towns"
• Fleshed out non-combat roles and activities, such as surveying, cooking, farming, entertaining, building, crafting, etc.
• Attributes and skills which develop via active usage rather than arbitrary "leveling up" or "assigning points"
• Relevant bonuses from attributes for ALL activities (no "combat exclusive" attributes)
• And more!

With a list like this, how can we ever expect to finish?  Well, the first step is to start!  As we move forward we'll gradually add features, and once we reach a minimal point where required Stage 1 features are implemented we can begin more public testing on servers!  While much of this game IS still in development (even the name may change!) the core functionality has already been established and solved, it just needs to be fully implemented and tweaked. 

Development of this project will be slow for now as I work on wrapping up other work, so unfortunately we'll just have to see how long it takes.  However, this has become a passion project of mine, and as such I intend to develop it regardless.  So if you are reading this, thank you for taking the time and I hope to have more to show you later!

Expect the first technical post within a few days (once I get time to sit down and make another post)!