>>6395417>one inspiration I had in mind was a flash game series I played as a kid called Decision. It was a series of 2 or 3 games, pretty popular at the time on the usual websites like Kongregate and Armor Games. Basically its premise was that a dude decides to reclaim a city by himself during a zombie apocalypse, and the gameplay consisted of going through progressively more infested and dangerous areas one by one, clearing them of zombies, warding them off with walls, building defences like towers, and eventually reclaiming the whole city.That's crazy. My absolute favorite zombie game (and one of the best flash games up there with Creeper World & Gemcraft) was called REBUILD which I originally thought you were confusing with another game until I looked up Decision because it sounded so similar.
Rebuild has you overseeing a group of survivors slowly retaking a city, also having areas go from red to green in terms of zombie infestation, letting you basically take over the city block by block as you clear out areas. Once an area is safe you can add it to your colony and whatever building it has will give you more stats; like apartment complexes granting more living space, bars and churches improving morale, and police stations increasing the defense of your entire fortress. I really liked how you were essentially playing a city-builder but as a strategy war game. Rebuild 2 added to this concept by having actual victory conditions, like needing to capture all of the science labs around the city and having several max level scientists to discover a zombie cure, or capture city hall and make a new government, or just take back the entire city (but requires you to successfully invade the graveyard, which has a portal to hell). Shame what they did with the stand-alone Steam release of the 3rd game.
I think the best way to approach a system like this for questing is similar to a civ or management style game, where captured areas grant certain resources or NPC bonuses. Like capturing the mushroom forest and making friends with the goblins grants unlimited mushroom wine, and naturally clearing the dwarven mines would grant you access to the lava steel forges. I can't speak on the possibility of a twist, but your post did give me the idea of an amnesiac MC who slowly learns of a great team of adventurers who went into this dungeon to clear it, and knows he was a part of it, but doesn't know who. Maybe there was a legend of a betrayer who ruined the whole expedition and the MC is afraid it was him, but then at the end it is revealed he actually was just the big hero and just randomly got hit on the head with a rock and forgot everything. To me that'd be a fun "twist".
>these are all tools that can be combined and discarded in a single project imo.I moreso meant that I can see a "human male fighter" or "solo elf mage" megadungeon quest; but if it's "just a guy vs megadungeon" it's kind of weird imo
