What sort of game could I turn this into?

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So I started making some essential things for a sort of survival game inspired by Forager (you should look at the game to get a feel of what I’m going for):

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I was thinking of having the map be in a hexagonal grid, starting off with just a single piece of hexagonal land, unlocking more in some way.


I also have this mining system and inventory system with no UI. Now the problem I’m having is I can’t for the life of me think up a good progression model. Everything I think of seems either too complicated for a younger audience, or makes the “lower tier” (like wood, stone, maybe even iron) resources useless in the later stages of the game, making the progression very bland and linear.

I just want to hear what other people think, to get some more ideas in my head, and maybe then I can come up with something that I like.

EDIT: I’m also open to ideas of a completely different genre, like a dungeon crawler maybe.

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If you don’t want the lower tier resources to eventually become useless, make them important to progress. Maybe add new items that the worse resources make that you need to make to be able to utilize your newer resources.
An example would be like using wood to craft an item with limited durability (so you need to keep using wood) and using that item to be able to craft items using better materials.
To help with items becoming obsolete and progression, you could also have items that aren’t ‘nessescary’, so that once players have everything they need, they can continue to keep playing the game using older resource stockpiles to make items that aren’t critical towards gameplay but allow for creativity or enjoyability.