So I was having trouble with an idea.  I’m trying to stick with the definition of cavern which is a naturally occurring void in the earth, and perhaps that’s too limiting.  I came up with two concepts I like though, and one I’m going to develop.

The runner up for me was Stalactite.. here’s the crummy mockup:

Where the idea was to grow stalactites by somehow moving the water around. The soluble minerals that could become stalactites would be limited resources, as would the water. But although that could be a neat simulation, I didn’t see a game.

Option 2 is a competitive game where there is a town being built over a cavern. There are two players (I’ll initially code hotseat multiplayer, and then code some type of AI). A grid represents the town, and another grid represents the cavern. Each turn a player can either place a building, or a support. Buildings have different weights. If the stress at a given point exceeds some constant (TBD), a sinkhole forms and the buildings within the confines of the sinkhole fall to the cavern level and are out of play. The game ends when… (I’m not sure yet). Each player gets points for his opponents buildings in the cavern, and loses points for his own buildings in the cavern.

My goal for the rest of the evening is to get a mock-up done of this, and a basic UI.

-TF