This sets the paleolithic mindset where wild lives are very dangerous, and human dominates nowhere.
When the player goes to some place which is too dangerous to survive the character will quickly get killed, the character or game is reset in someway to allow the player to continue and then the player thinks, "Oh, I'm not supposed to be there yet. I'll come back when I can make a bow or spear or something." Eventually (assuming he hasn't gone there first) the player finds his way to the canyons and starts hunting there. The question then is, does the player learn that hunting is dangerous or does he just learn that the one area is dangerous? Also, if the amount of food that he brings back is small does he start to think that life in paleolithic era is difficult or does he just think that the difficulty of the game is unfairly balanced?
Typically the first parts of a game are more about giving the player a chance to get a grasp of the mechanics of the game and general story exposition. I'm not sure if diving right into reaching players on a personal level is the way to go. I'm curious as to what other chapters you're planning. The way they all fit together will no doubt have an effect on your ability to connect to the audience and get your point accross.
Just my $0.02 meant to be constructive criticism. Overall I think it's a cool idea.
This has something to do with how the game concludes a defeat. For instance, when Hubby is defeated by an elephant the game could end with a conclusion:
** The elephant is too strong! **
If Hubby returns with too little food, the game would conclude with:
** Need more food! **
A chapter doesn't have just one message. Depending on how the chapter ends a different message is displayed. The player would need to end the chapter differently to see different messages.
Concepts of other chapters
o Hunting party - The player selects a group to go hunt together and share the rewards and losses.
o Tool/weapon making - Hunting with more lethal hunting partners do you trust who you go with?
o The other tribe - The player encounters people from another tribe. What to do with them?
o Invader - The home cave is attacked!
o Migration - The tribe finds a better place for a home.
o Spare food - The group final got food to spare, what to do with them?
I don't want the player to be amused by the scenarios. I want the player to play the game knowing that each scenario is modelling a truth about humans. I want the player to first experience the environment, then compare the conclusion with the truth that is revealed at the end of each chapter.
Are you planning on giving the player the ability to roam freely and discover things on his own or are you planning a more scripted aproach?
Is the player is actually going to be guarenteed to be hunting an elephant as part of the story before hunting the easy critters? Perhaps a scripted story and levels showing a caveman's successes and failures could reach an audience on the level you want. In which case these one line conclusions you want to do likely will have an impact on the audience and effectively tell a story.
But if the player has significant freedom to roam, I don't think the single line of text upon success or failure of a chapter is going to be sufficient by itself to impart upon the player something deeper than the challenge and entertainment he'll recieve from the game. In effect, the player will only see it as a "Try Again" or "Mission Accomplished" message which I get the impression is not what you want.
I am not sure whether it is scripted or free in your definition. This is the sequence of events as the player would see:
0.10 - The game begins with Hubby leaves home at dawn
0.15 - Hubby walks out of the cave screen and into the screen with three locations plus the home cave.
0.18 - Hubby walks into one of the three locations. The stage of that location is loaded, showing the environment. If Hubby exits that location, it becomes dusk and Hubby would walk home.
0.20 - Within the selected stage, the player explores the stage to find food. There is something the player could get in each stage.
0.30 - The player should have identified a source of danger. This means that Hubby might have tried to hunt an elephant but died, got bitten by a snake, or fell off a cliff. If either case happens, the game displays a one-line message or a hint, and the game reset to dawn when Hubby is leaving home.
0.40 - By this time, the player had encountered danger and had survived it by avoiding the danger or defeating the danger.
0.50 - The player had identified at least one type of food that Hubby could get, and is devising a plan to get it.
0.60 - The player executes the plan to get that food.
0.70 - The player gets the food.
0.80 - The player might have several food available to take home. The player must choose one.
0.90 - Hubby returns at dusk with food, or without food when time is up. When Wifey sees Hubby she is either happy or still hungry.
1.0 - A conclusive message to end the chapter. These conclusive messages are not one-liners. These are cutscenes that shows the situation in its historical context, with a sympathetic and admiring tone that the player had overcome the same type of challenges and shortcomings the cave people faced to earn their existence.
Rising pressure: When the time approaches dusk, several predator types become active. They might attack Hubby or to just to steal the food Hubby got.
What sort of information are you going to present to the player to make these various decisions? As what you’ve described so far sounds an awful lot like make a guess die retry.
Take the 3 choices of locations to hunt. What information on those locations and prehunt preparation am I given? Do I just make a choice and try my luck at guessing what options you’ve designed for the player to get food from that location.
The sequence of events you’ve outlined seems to be built around a negative reinforcement loop. Most of the available options appear to result in defeat but the player only learns which option result in defeat by trying them and loosing. Won’t that alienate the player? Rather then feeling a sense of accomplishment for getting elephant meat they are more likely to be frustrated and annoyed that they kept dying because the solution requires luck and a sequence of events only obvious to the games designer.
1) Animals that are afraid of you would hide from you 2) Animals that are not afraid of you would not hide 3) Animals that see you as prey would hunt you
4) Elephants are huge and heavy, have tusks, and travel in group. They don't walk away when Hubby walks near. Some might charge Hubby.
5) Scorpions have stingers. When you walk close it faces you with stinger. 6) Bees have stingers 7) Hyenas are sneaky and they follow you at a distance with increasing number.
This is not trial and error or luck based. It is obvious when an animal start chasing Hubby. In that case the player doesn't need to try to see what is dangerous. Danger hunts you. This isn't a dreamworld, normal animal behaviors apply.
In chapter 1, there is no prehunt preparation. The stages are designed so that Hubby could bring at least one food type home from either environment.
Some types of positive feedback:
o) Animals that are prey would in general hide or run away from Hubby o) Hubby could taste fruit on the spot when he finds them. He spits bad fruits.
From what you described I would say you're letting the player roam freely. Free roaming type games face a greater challenge when trying to tell a story to the player. You have a lot of 'Might's and 'Should's in your storyboard. You can't trust the player to what you want. It sounds to me that to get the message you want to players, basicly that life in the stone age was hard, you pretty much need the player to fail at things. What happens if you do get a player that lucks out or reads the in game clues, and has little trouble geting sufficient food home? Will the player have experienced the game sufficiently the way you hoped him to?
You also have the opposite problem to contend with. What if a player just doesn't get it? The clues that you leave would probably be obvious signs of danger to an ancient caveman or maybe even a modern hunter. But what are these signs to a gamer? Yes, I generally know that it's safer to hunt a rabit than a tiger but how do I know which I'm supposed to hunt in the game? As a gamer I might try hunting the tiger first, get my ass handed to me and figure, "Ok that didn't work how about I try something smaller." Then I'd go chasing rabits and at the end of the day find that I haven't brought home enough food. I then find myself completly uncertain of what to do. You run the risk that the player's conclusion won't be that life in the stone age was hard but that the game is hard.
If I were in your shoes, I'd restrict the story more. I'd first send the player to a hunting grounds that is too dangerous. The player dies or is injured once or twice trying to tackle things that are too much to handle. Conclusion, "I need to find a safer place to hunt." Open up a new location or maybe change the mission slightly to find a new hunting ground. At the new hunting ground the prey is easy to catch but yields little nutrition. Conclusion, "I need to find something more substancial." Lastly, the player finds a new place that has opened up and the food there fits his needs and the chapter concludes.
By holding the player's hand through each of the otherwise negative experiences you give him the sense that he's making progress in the game as intended. And at the same time, experiencing those negative events teaches the lessons that you want to teach.
I appologise if I hijacked your idea, please feel free to ignore me. It's just what I'd do and one opinion on how you might consider achieving your objective.
I don't need the player to fail to feel threats. There is nothing wrong if the player finds the situation obvious and correctly avoided the dangers and got enough food home the first time. The conclusion would just reiterate the facts that the player would probably know, and continue to the next chapter. In that case, the player feels confirmed that he knew the lessons that the game environment had been encoded with. The game is not designed to be a platform with infinite amount of details to discover.
The player would only know whether a food type is enough by bring it home. Note that the game itself is only about 3 minutes in length, and if the player returns early, the game ends early. Suppose the player goes to the mountains, pick an apple and go home, that might only take 30 seconds. But Wifey will be unhappy and the game would suggest the player to get something better the next day. Then the game resets to a morning where Hubby leaves.
Suppose you are the player and you brought an apple home thinking that all you need is to bring some food home. Then when you go home the first time, you will know that you are suppose to get more. The amount you need to bring home could be graphically displayed. But I don't want to have too many meters so perhaps when Hubby leaves in the morning, Hubby and Wifey would going into a graphical dialog session:
Hubby: "(Apple Icon)" Wifey: "(Two apples Icon)" Hubby: "(Check Mark Icon)"
The intended meaning is that Hubby promises to bring home two apples. It is okay if Hubby brings back different type. (In this scenario, the player would discover that Hubby can only carry one thing at a time, so creativity is required to bring two apples home.)
In your suggest, I don't want the player to go through an experience that they know is impossible. I mean I don't want a case where the game puts Hubby to hunt tiger, the player already suspect that that is not possible, but the player has no way to progress the story until he fails. Imagine that your are playing the game the second time from the start, then you would just run into the tiger to satisfy the plot trigger.
In my design, the negative experiences are consequences of bad player decisions. The game did not make those decisions for the player. The player makes stupid choices. They are not forced onto the player. The game is not trying to make the game feel hard, or to make the player experience hardship. The game is merely reconstructing the environment. Whether the player finds the environment easy to understand and overcome is independent that that particular design goal. The game is not forcing the player to experience defeat.
In the other style of scripted sequence, you could have a case where on the first morning, Hubby is only asked to bring home any food type. On the second morning, Hubby is expected to bring back more. On each morning, Wifey would suggest a more difficult food type to bring back that hasn't been brought back. When Hubby brings back the most difficult food type, plot advances to the next chapter.
In that design, Chapter 1 and 2 are like this:
Chapter 1 - Bring Food Home Hubby departs in the morning, select a location, and try to bring some food home. In this chapter, as long as Hubby brings some food home, the story progresses to the next chapter. Surviving and bringing food back is hard enough. Any food is fine. Wifey: "(Love)".
Chapter 2 - Hunting Party Now that Hubby has some sense of what creatures are in which location, Wifey (or the tribe) would make suggestions on what to bring back. The story advances when Hubby and hunting partners succeed in bringing back the most difficult food type.
