games for building support

Thanks all for the thoughts.

I've had some more thoughts about it myself -- I no longer believe that
a Minecraft-style editable world within each hab makes sense. That's
too small a scale for even a moderately-sized habitat. I now think
something like SimCity would be a better model. You directly build
municipal buildings and public works like parks; you also zone land for
private development, but don't control exactly what gets built there.

So each plot of land would either be empty (apart from a terrain type),
or be part of a "building" (which would include things like playgrounds
or whatever). The game would need to include a large number of building
types, each with a 3D model, and simulation stats: how many residents
and employees it supports, its CO2 -> O2 conversion rate (and
direction), its power and food consumption (or production), its money
burn rate, etc.

So the overall game flow would be:

1. Design a habitat by combining parts from a parts library.
2. Deploy a design by selecting an orbit. (The orbit you select will
impact the build cost; material sources and delivery costs will vary
over the course of the game as folks here would expect.)
3. Manage a habitat, SimCity style. The chief high-level variables
you're managing are residents, power, O2/CO2, food, and probably water.
(Water is recycled, sure, but we could divide it into "potable" and
"unpotable," so you have to make sure you provide sufficient recycling
capacity for your population.) And of course money -- I'm imagining you
can set tax rates, which impacts prices for your residents but also
funds the whole enterprise.
4. Go back to step 1 at any time, or check in on a previous habitat at
step 3.

Cheers,
- Joe