The main point of the game is survival -- you have a fixed lifespan and deleterious events will drain it quicker than the normal passage of time (hospital stays, jail stays). If you run out of lifespan altogether, you become a young street rat again and can ransack your old house for some stuff but obviously you're limited the way you were at the start of the game.
The world is highly dystopian, and pulls from the same thread there as neptopia/TDoN.
I'm not sure what the overall game goal is yet, I'm sure I'll get there though.
So basically Neptopian mechanics, except less complicated and a different engine/setting obviously.
Both of those things require money, which can be earned in various ways -- more profitable ones generally requiring something more than a temporary shelter.
You start off as a Street Rat without skills in any area whatsoever (except being a Street Rat I guess). Doing various actions improves your skills in those areas, and there are other ways to improve them as well (assuming you can afford training or whatever other mechanics there are).
You can find Work -- various shops will offer you jobs to do various manual labor type things for minimal pay. This should fit in heavily into the Lore, which I'm thinking I might make sci-fi to fit into the general cyberpunk dystopia aesthetic.
More rarely, you can find Courier work. Pays better, and has you delivering stuff from one building to another, learning routes and transportation and stuff in the process.
You can use the Reseller mechanic to make chump change and eventually more profit. I'll cover that in a bit.
You can take on Skilled work, which pays higher -- but you have to have Skill in that area. There's maybe a tree of skills so you can sort of get a job like this from doing Courier or Reseller type work and then expand your skills accordingly from the job, and/or use the money for Training purposes. Skilled work also requires Decorum fitting your position, which borrows from the middle class mechanics in Neptopia.
You can become a petty thief or maybe a more violent one. You start out not being particularly good at this, and obviously the consequences of jail or hospital visits are a lot higher. Nonetheless it is possible to make bank in this way.
A more interesting mechanic, based on no small way on my own irl around it.
There's a wide variety of items that fit into the setting with dubious value that you have to kind of learn as you go (and it's procedural so you learn things a bit differently from seed to seed, though the value ranges are all the same at least).
They'll have various condition tags applied to them -- might be okay, might be broken in some way or horribly dirty. These debuffs on value can be improved with the right tools, provided you live somewhere of course.
Starting out you can find these in trash cans and dumpsters rarely -- provided you don't mind sifting through trash, avoiding LEOs and whatnot.
You can also sift through bins of stuff at Junk shops, where you're buying stuff by the pound. Takes a bit of a capital investment and the stuff is likely broken or dirty but it can be well worth the time you put into it.
You can also fence stuff that you've stolen if you avoid getting caught. This stuff tends to be higher quality although it's obviously also high risk. Warehouse-type buildings and large shops have the best stuff but also the highest security so you'd need to be a pretty accomplished thief to pull off that kind of heist.
You can sleep outside on the street. It's free. However depending on where you are there's a chance of hospital, jail or (most likely) getting robbed. Also you obviously can't store anything and have no fixtures to work with.
There are some various highly dystopian solutions like cages or remodeled storage containers or whatever. Rents vary depending on the amount of Room you have. There's a very annoying Cramped mechanic in place that lets you do a lot with a small and cheaper space if you don't mind being, well, cramped.
You can actually get apartments and houses and stuff but they cost a heck of a lot obviously. Also you can't buy them -- the entire housing market is rent-driven, much like in TDoN.
If you have a Vehicle, you can sleep in it if you find a good place. Can be risky LEO-wise if you're not careful but it's free at least. Additionally, Vehicles can be broken into which is problematic if you've got valuable tools and battery-operated fixtures in there.
