So I've had this idea floating around for a bit. It's inspired a bit by the Warrior Cats fangame ClanGen, and much more by the Sims 4 community minigame The Ultimate Decades Challenge, two wildly embarrassing things to be inspired by, but here we are. Both of those sources have a really interesting focus on lineage, genetics, inheritance, and the effect of past choices on future generations, and those are the ideas I wanted to explore with more focus than either source.
Basically, it's a text-based life simulator that follows a family line, rather than an individual. You would start as a single guy in medieval England. Then try to get married and have enough children that one of your sons survives to adulthood, at which point the perspective would transfer to him. The ultimate goal is for the family to survive to modern day. Meanwhile, history is happening all around them in the form of events that may or may not effect them. There would also be a couple of parallel NPC families to interact with, possibly with their own hard-coded stories, or maybe they're also affected by the historical RNG so it's more of a random, unique experience each time the game is played, or a combination of both strategies.
In any case, I wasn't very serious about the idea until this past weekend, when I happened to read a bit about the markup engine Twine and decided to play with its browser version a bit. Suddenly four hours had gone past and I had a semi-functional demo on my hands.
I may yet start over from scratch, but at the very least I'm mapping my inheritance and random character generation algorithms. The issue I've run into is storing potentially infinite characters. When variable names are hard-coded, how does one even tackle such a thing? So the demo right now plays like this: You partly customize a hard-coded main character and are introduced to the hard-coded startup state of the world. You choose one of three randomly generated women to marry. You can then watch seasons and years pass by continuing, but the only event you learn about is pregnancy and birth, and the genetics of the baby. There are bugs in the system to store the children and watch them age, so you only see time pass for the adults.
Basically my goals right now are to first fix this core gameplay loop, and then complete it with the addition of an inheritance function (to transfer the player from the current main character to their heir). After that I want to focus on a family tree and more character details before elaborating on the gameplay loop.