As the title indicates, I'm making a fangame in Godot. I have little to show for it yet, and probably won't for a while, but I am decently serious about this idea, and have plans for how the game will work beyond vague ambitions. I'll give a summary here, though the tldr is "Oregan Trail but with a Skill system":
At the start of an expedition you'll select your initial items and party composition. That means picking which Classes to bring, and potentially trading off better or higher level party members with the gold you spend on other things.
An individual's Class will naturally come with Skills, which will bring small influences to many other 'standard' aspects of the game, for instance, a [Hunter] may have a skill that reduces the ammunition spent while hunting, or a [Beast Tamer] may have a skill that gives a chance to pacify and tame wild animals encountered on the journey. Ideally, party members will be able to level up depending on the obstacles they face, and gain more skills as the journey continues.
The core gamecycle will consist of days passing as the party travels further and consumes rations. It won't be fancy, just an automated system with some simple but hopefully pleasant visuals like in the Oregan Trail and similar games, with the option to pause and adjust the party's pace and food consumption or do other activities like go hunting. This will be interrupted by events, which can be pretty much anything at all. Injuries, accidents, diseases, bad weather, insects, monster attacks, animal packs, thieves, bandits, other expeditions, corpses, ghosts, ruins, rivers, etc. Some of these will be automatic, others will provide a choice of options with different trade-offs. Many will have chance-based outcomes influenced by the Classes and Skills of your party. I plan to have some 'plot threads' where certain events follow up other ones depending on what you did in the first one.
Hunting (and combat more generally as I think I could use the same system for hunting, monster attacks, and fighting bandits) is something I'm less decided on yet, as I would like it to be possible for multiple party members to contribute, but I also am definitely not up for programming anything approaching a proper real-time or turn-based strategy minigame, and I think I would rather the whole game remain fairly 'minimalist' in terms of interaction. So right now what I have in mind is that there will be some initial options to select your approach, and then the hunt (or fight) will be simulated and you'll see the results, hopefully again with a little visual. There might be 'active skills' for combat, in the sense that you can set a skill to be used for a particular fight, at the cost of having to wait for a cooldown to use it again.
You will also run into trading posts, newborn colonies, merchants available for trade and the like, which will have their own likely simple system for buying and selling. I don't currently see myself doing anything complex with them, but it's possible.
The ultimate goal will be to found a new colony yourself, earning points upon doing so. Some classes, like [Builder], will be less useful for the journey itself, but provide more points if you reach the end, so there'll be a tradefoff where to get the most points possible youll need to bring weaker classes. Right now I intend on having the journey end at a pre-specified distance into the New Lands, but I think adding a mode where you pick where you settle yourself wouldn't be hard. I may add other modes that have a different goal entirely (like to find treasure and bring it back) but thats a cloud in the sky at this point.
I'm making this post to open a hand for suggestions, if anyone's got them. Feel free to be as general or specific as you like. I expect most people will suggest ideas for Classes, Skills and events, but if you have ideas for how systems should work feel free to offer those as well. I'm quite new to making games and while programming isn't hard for me, game design is something I feel like I need other people's input on, hence why I made this post.