I've been doing more prototyping.
Basically, I've been trying to get the absolute basic game loop down. Idle farm ore, smelt ore into bars, forge bars into furniture, place furniture. I don't really know why I decided to try this, I guess I'm just still obsessed with the idea of space in games. I've been playing neopets and kinda lamenting that neohomes never took off. I remember editing my neohome as a kid, back when it was top-down view. Some part of me wanted so badly to feel like the home was real. I remember looking at the blob that was a basic blue sofa and trying to imagine what that would look like from different angles and how cool it could be.
I also was testing out idle farming gameplay, like old school Farmville. I know that Farmville isn't highly regarded as a game...cuz it was more like a pioneer in microtransactions and facebook flash games, but it was genuinely fun to play and customize my plot of land. I remember that back then, there was a glitch with the way hay bales rendered. Basically the game was in isometric tiles and if a hay bale was directly behind another hay bale ("diagonally" in terms of tile directions) then it would display on top of the hay bale instead. I ended up creating a whole bunch of black hay bales and figuring out how to place them so that it looked like a black castle made of hay bales.
So I ended up taking these inspirations and trying to build a prototype where you idle-farm ores like in Runescape, you smelt copper+tin into bronze bars like Runescape. You forge those bars into chairs, and then you can place those chairs in your own space. Right now it's just a vertical slice so it's literally just chairs. And so, I present to you, esteemed reader, my newest premium immersive live service open world gacha experience...