Basic Outline of a New Game Idea

I came up with this while joking with my friend about what kinds of video games I'd like to make (my answer was "one with zombies and kittens. Oh yeah, I'd like to do an RTS and/or RPG as well").

Genre: Combination RTS/RPG. There is leveling involved, as well as organized battles.
*Start with just AI enemies
*Look into adding networking later

Premise: The player is a bioweapons developer for a warlord. There are many warlords with their own bioweapons developers in different parts of the world, which effects the kind of specimens you have to experiment on. For example, although naturally you'll always have humans around, a Russian nation would also have bears, wolves, etc. Humans are "stock" weapons and won't be as powerful as an equivalent animal weapon.

As the developer you are tasked with creating the superior virus for infection. You must collect samples, mix and match, and experiment. Your weapons can be put into battle, where they will either succeed (allowing your weapons to level up and giving you access to your enemies weapons) or fail (resulting in you going back to square one, either because your weapons die or get taken by the opposing force). The developer can take samples from a successful bioweapon to produce new bioweapons, and once again are able to mix and match new viruses with the new samples to produce even better new stock. However, of course, this is limited by both a level cap and the number of times you can actually take a sample from a single weapon. Details on this still need to be worked out.**

**(I'm not claiming this idea is at all original, but I haven't really seen much that follows this idea...though apparently there is a Half Life 2 mod called Zombie Master that has a slightly similar idea. Naturally a lot of credit goes to the Resident Evil franchise as well.)

The programming language will likely be either Lisp (leaning towards this) or C++, maybe both if I'm stupid enough to not want to sleep ever. Unless I can find either an EXCELLENT sprite making program or someone to design sprites for me, this game will likely be text based, as I'm not a graphics person and not at all interested in trying to figure out the graphics end of it. I'm going to try and rope in my sister, but I'm not at all confident she'll be able to help in any capacity outside of drawing me some great pictures, since as far as I know she doesn't know how to do game graphics either. Updates on this as they come, I need to start designing it soon though or I'll lose interest and never get going.