Feasibility of a project.

So, me and a friend were talking about X3 and Elite: Dangerous, and their market systems, and we wondered how feasible it would be to create an economy game within CC. None of the ship piloting that you have in either of those games, just a pure economy. Obviously there would be heavy number manipulation going on in the background, and there would be network stuff if it was decided that networked games were achievable. But other than that, how feasible is this project as a whole? Presumably we would use some external and our own internal API's to assist us, so we don't have to write all of the code ourself.

What, like a share trading game? Certainly sounds very feasible to me; but the fact that you're asking suggests you'll find there's a fair bit of learning involved.

Perhaps mock up some screenshots of what you intend it to be like.

Not quite shares, more commodities. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=121140187 That link should hopefully give you some insight into our vision. Obviously, for the actual game it would be primarily text based and based on the same Supply+Demand concept that X3 utilized.

Feasible but challenging. Early trading games gave users a fixed budget and a list of commodities with randomly fluctuating prices, which could easily be replicated in computercraft. The problem with these games though is that there's limited interactivity with stock prices, it's effectively gambling. There's no real end goal either, except perhaps earn the most money after X turns.

Trading games really need more than just fluctuating prices to make them engaging and interesting:
- Some way of having the user influence or impact prices through interaction. Not many trading games do this
- Some way of being able to learn the patterns underlying price changes, and learn how to predict them
- Some other mechanic or element that the profits from trading goes towards (spaceships in your examples)

I think the biggest battle with these games is finding some learnable but not obvious pattern behind stock fluctuating and having the player learn and engage with it. Difficult task but good luck with it :)/>