/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

I've been trying to start a pony sandbox project before, but with my googling disability I'm absolutely hopeless at programming. After hearing about how someone showed how bad Yanderedev is at his work by remaking Yandere Simulator from scratch in one hour, I decided to write the plans for my dream project here in case someone with any coding skill could help with getting this project started.

Synopsis: An open source sandbox of bots working independently, like a mixture of The Sims and Dwarf Fortress, if the NPCs had even more autonomy. Each pony has stats like hunger and tiredness, and the AI chooses the ponies actions by calculating priorities for each task and performing the highest scoring one. Low-poly graphics with flat shading would look cartoony, be light to run and easy to create, and majority of specialized animations could be skipped simply by covering the ponies front half with a cartoony dust cloud depicting their intense working.

The endgoal of the project would be providing players a town of ponies with their own thoughts and personalities, for the players to play and mess with how they please. While the first releases should focus mainly on making the ponies work independently, the ability to give ponies orders in the form of tasks with maximum priority should be easy to implement. Ability to directly possess ponies and play as one yourself is still a far-fetched dream at this point.

While the project as a whole sounds ambitious, it can be easily split into several smaller releases, each one adding a handful of new features at a time. This way new releases can be done quickly while still adding new depth to the game with each new update. The requirements for the first release in particular should be pretty light:

-Ponies have variables for hunger, tiredness, and what their bed is.
-Hunger and tiredness grow with time.
-If hunger is the ponies highest priority, pony finds the closest food item and eats it.
-If tiredness is the highest priority, pony goes to sleep in its bed. While it has no bed, this task will get a negative modifier to its priority while shelter building gets a positive one. If the pony is about to pass out and still doesn't have a bed, it will go sleep on ground next to the nearest bed there is.
-If pony doesn't have a bed yet, collecting sticks to build a shelter has a set priority so the pony will put its effort to it as long as more important tasks don't override it. The pony should build its shelter in a random spot within short distance from any other building.
-Idling has its own set priority, so if there are no more pressing matters the pony will just stand idle instead of eating endlessly.

The items required for this release:
-Pony
-Apple (default food)
-Appletree (default food source, can be kicked by hungry ponies to instantly produce an apple)
-Tree (can be kicked by ponies to produce a stick)
-Stick shelter construction site (a spot pony will collect sticks at, until there are enough to build a shelter.
-Stick shelter (default dwelling, serves as a bed. Beds have a variable for owner, who is the only pony who can sleep in them.)

Additional notes:
Using large numbers for the priorities and other variables is a good idea, since for example rating hunger from 100 to 1 doesn't allow nearly as smooth transitions as rating it from 1000000 to 1.
Also, it might be a good idea to add distance to closest task to the priority calculations, so a pony already standing next to an apple tree is more likely to eat when food is near.
When selecting a new task, giving a small priority bonus for the previous task makes the pony focus on one job at a time instead of constantly switching between two tasks with almost equal priorities.
Items need a variable to indicate if a pony is currently using them for its current task, to avoid multiple ponies going for the same branch or apple.

These would be enough for the first proof-of-concept release for the sandbox. An example run of it could go something like this:
>First pony is spawned, has no hunger, tiredness or bed.
>Eating and sleeping get low priorities, building a shelter wins because it has the highest priority.
>With no other shelters around, pony defaults to the center of the maps and creates a building site in a random spot near it.
>Pony bucks trees, gets sticks, and brings them to the construction site.
>As ponies hunger grows, after delivering a few sticks, when selecting the next action, eating gets a higher priority.
>Pony heads to the nearest apple tree, bucks it and eats the falling apple.
>With hunger lowered, building a shelter gets the higher priority again and the pony proceeds to collect sticks.
>When the site has enough sticks, the pony turns them into a shelter and sets itself as the owner of the bed.
>With the bed constructed, the ponies highest priority is eating again, and it will get another apple from a tree.
>With hunger lowered below the idling priority, the pony will stand around, checking its priorities every few seconds.
>Eventually its tiredness grows over the idling treshold and it heads to its bed to sleep.
>While sleeping, the only priorities the pony checks are hunger and tiredness, and will sleep until it's either well-rested or too hungry to sleep.

There you have it. I have spent several months producing nothing but spaghetti code, so it's better for everyone to have a proper programmer start it from scratch. What do you think about the plan this far? Any comments or suggestions?