Given that you're dealing with aliens who have an insect-like culture, I think it will be hard to convey a lot of emotion or plot through words. There will be a strong cultural disconnect between your aliens and the human audience playing the game. In this case, you can convey emotional investment through aesthetics rather than actual words. Making the aliens cutesy and endearing would go a long way to getting players invested in the aliens.

Pikmin did this fabulously. For one, the design of the Pikmin was abstract and cartoony. Probably the single greatest graphical element in Pikmin, however, was their death animation wherein a little Pikmin soul flies out of their body when they die. This was a great way to make the player feel kind of bad for letting the Pikmin die, and helped make them feel responsible for the little dudes.

You could anthropomorphize their society to give it human-like elements. Actually have the aliens talk to one another, make them have relationships and enemies. That would certainly be a weird and interesting take on the topic, since insect-like societies tend to be more mechanical in nature. The focus is far less on the individual, but far more on the hive (and its success). As for the specific dialogue... I'm not 100% sure, I'd have to think about it.

Oh, and a thought. The founder could not lay eggs himself, but instead could be responsible for fertilizing and nourishing the eggs. He could secrete a pool of goo that eggs would be laid in, and the composition of the goo would determine what hatches from the eggs. The Founder could then enter its vulnerable state just before preparing the goo to make another Founder.

I would choose to anthropomorphize it. I was thinking of the player as being like a "duke" or "plantation owner" who controls an estate, is responsible for its population of workers, is responsible for its revenue and spending (in this case, of biological energy instead of money), and is the main link between the fairly self-contained world of the estate and the outside world. The idea of a harem is also applicable (the more realistic historical type of harem which included a nursery, schooling for children, care for the elderly, weaving and sewing, and probably a kitchen which fed the whole estate's population.)

Maybe it's my background as a science fiction reader and writer, or maybe it's just that I'm a verbal/analytical type of person, but when I encounter an alien culture, although atmospherics and aesthetics are cool, I want a verbal explanation and illustration of their culture. The explanation part would be narration and possibly introspection, while the illustration part would be dialogue as well as cartoony interactions.

You know a lot of insects don't actually have social structures or hierarchies?

Queens aren't actually queens, they're just producers. It's a caste, a job, a thing to be done. Ants and bees and so on don't give or take orders. There's no centralized planning or power structure. It's literally anarchy, but without the antagonistic, conflict-perspective tinge that anarchist teenagers have. They're all on the same page.

You should think about this, I feel like it's an under-explored aspect of the insects in pop culture. You seem to want to liken them to feudal systems and this might be a good step out of your comfort zone.

I do know how various kinds of insect societies work, yes. My interest as a science fiction and fantasy writer is to write about human nature, so I'm interested in creating aliens who are fundamentally human on the inside, though their culture will have evolved differently due to their different biology. In this particular case I want to create a reason for the player to be the leader of the aliens, making all the decisions for them, and at the same time I want the position 'leader of the aliens' to be a position human players will find gratifying and satisfying. None of this is about comfort zone, it's about what kind of story I want to tell and how I want it to appeal to the audience. I certainly don't always create feudal cultures in my fiction - sometimes a tribal culture is more fitting to the story I want to tell, sometimes a military bureaucracy is more fitting...

Don't get so defensive. I'm just suggesting something to think about. But you were very specifically making feudal analogies. I never said you always do that so frankly I have no idea what you're talking about.


I do wonder why, if you want to write science fiction and the human condition, why you aren't interested in anything else. How do you understand what is human without understanding what isn't, or what else is possible? You don't have to write about that and I wouldn't expect you to already know about that, I was just sharing because I thought it was interesting.

Sorry if I put it more rudely earlier, I accidentally ate something I shouldn't have yesterday and every time I do that I get into arguments on the internet because it makes me cranky and stupider for a few days. (I have celiac - gluten is like a direct kick to the brain.)

Oh, I have a friend who has that, and it does totally screw up her moods. I read your previous post as talking-down a bit, but if you weren't intending that then I apologize for overreacting.

Just as an abstract point of philosophy, I do think that being human gives one the ability to understand what is human without understanding much about what isn't human. In more practical terms, I feel like my education and my pleasure reading have had plenty to say about non-human mindsets, and I don't feel a need to explore that by writing about it. I've read several readers' and authors' statements in favor of creating 'truly alien aliens', so I believe I understand why some people think that's an admirable thing to do. I have no objection to other people writing that. It just is boring to me. I've also read some readers' and authors' statements about why the most important thing fiction can study and teach about is human nature and how individuals within cultures go about trying to solve their problems. This is more interesting to me. I think other humans are the single most relevant challenge in most people's lives, and humans are, ourselves, more complex than anything we have yet managed to create or imagine. I'm interested in science fiction and fantasy because they are great for putting people into unusual situations one doesn't encounter in real life. I'm also interested in the increasing ability of humans to modify their bodies, and the question of how being in a human body shapes our thoughts, and would then cease to shape our thoughts if this factor were removed.

As a side note, although feudal and similar cultures might be considered overdone within the genre of fantasy, I think they remain relevant because they account for almost 1/3 of all the cultures humans have ever invented. This fact is illuminating of human nature, because it reveals that feudalism is a type of culture people instinctively form and one that feels right and satisfying to us in subconscious ways despite its many problems. It's also a kind of culture one sees among animals - not insects so much, but groups of mammals where only the alpha pair gets to reproduce, and also get to eat first and boss the others around, as well as herds where one dominant male polices a group of females. If meddling aliens were to take 500 humans from around the world and drop them unexpectedly on another planet I think it's very likely that a feudal culture would emerge among them, at least until they felt their situation was stable enough to start demanding more rights and representation. If their memories were erased before being dropped there, if they survived at all there is a large chance they would form a really long-lasting feudal culture before coming up with concepts like democracy and socialism.

Yeah, that was a cranky post, I'm sorry, I gotta stop doing that. Did not mean to be talking down, I just thought it was interesting.

Anyway, these are super interesting topics that I've been thinking a lot about lately but I'm not gonna derail the thread with 'em. Plus I already know we think very differently in some fundamental ways.

So I'm thinking about the story now. I'm not quite getting it except as a few things that happen about a founder getting kicked out of another society, but that hints at - as someone mentioned - creating founders and spinoff societies.

When I think about your initial pitch, I get something like this... We have a founder building a society. The founder is queenish; creates units. Or at least decides which are created, perhaps it can (as per the 'harem' comment) create units that can create units. But unlike insects, the founder is also a decision maker. You might decide the kinds (castes?) you create.

A few things jump to my mind.

One's an article on Gamasutra a read a while back where someone was musing about the possibility of character interaction being "the hud".

In this model - I'm trying to form a mental image of this - your Founder is your avatar, who can act, and you'd have some sort of information dissemination system you can talk to your spawned critters.

The actions of broadcasting information through communication would be a core component of the game which would involve actually trying to organize everyone to do things.

And of course there'd also be whatever actions a unit is actually capable of.

"[color="#1C2837"]I'm torn about the realtime growing thing, because it's so annoying in the sim games I've played that have it. Nothing worse than sitting staring at a screen waiting for 5 minutes to pass so you can make another move."
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[color="#1C2837"]You'd have other things to do.
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[color="#1C2837"]I'm drafting a prototype right now of a space colony game with a no-matter-or-information-faster-than-light rule and I was going to basically de-emphasize waiting on results in favor of continually building, launching, action at home and trying to work ahead of situations. In other words, there should constantly be short, quick loops happening, but you can also have big loops.
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[color="#1C2837"]Just not only the latter.
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[color="#1C2837"]This thinking is kind of primitive and I'll need to finish the prototype to decide if it's completely retarded or not, but, I'm just reminded a lot of that project so I'm making some comparisons.

Having bigger waiting processes and smaller waiting processes can work very well for a more complex game like an RTS. Having a leader of aliens controlling the breeding, reproduction, and resource-gathering sounds rather like the Zerg singleplayer campaign in Starcraft, actually. But the breeding sims I've played haven't been complex enough to always give the player something to do, resulting in irritating do-nothing waits even when played at max speed.

I'm embarrassed to admit I've never played Starcraft. RTSes never caught me.

There isn't much of a story here, but I do see the first bits of a world coming together to some sort of specs about what you want the themes to be, etc. etc. which in my mind is super important to arting a game product.

"[color="#1C2837"]the breeding sims I've played haven't been complex enough to always give the player something to do"

[color="#1C2837"]Sim Ant, while not a breeding sim, is notable; the colony (which was played straight with no hierarchy) pretty much ran itself but you could take control of an individual and play as that individual, and easily keep yourself occupied doing all the things that are done.

[color="#1C2837"]I'm thinking about a similar approach of having something purposeful for individuals to be doing, that you can also do, while also joining this with a breeding sim and a hierarchial society.

[color="#1C2837"]Can you program at all? Would you be interested in prototyping this with me? Do you want to flesh this out and build it at all or is this just a brainstorm?

I'm not a programmer, no. I'm a designer/writer/2d artist. I was intending to write up a brief design document for a breeding sim and then start making art for it, but I haven't decided whether to go with the aliens or use a different type of breedable.

In the zerg portion of Starcraft's single-player campaign, the first scene which establishes your character is this:

Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright. Know that I am the Overmind; the eternal will of the Swarm, and that you have been created to serve me. Behold that I shall set you amongst the greatest of my Cerebrates, that you might benefit from their wisdom and experience. Yet your purpose is unique. While they carry forth my will to the innumerable Broods, you have but one charge entrusted to your care. For I have found a creature that may yet become the greatest of my agents. Even now it resides within a protective Chrysalis, awaiting its rebirth into the Swarm. You must watch over the Chrysalis, and ensure that no harm comes to the creature within it. Go now and keep safe my prize. ||||| Mission Start |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| *** Beginning of the mission *** DAGGOTH The Hatchery is the heart of any Zerg colony. It spontaneously generates larva, which in turn are used to spawn your various warriors and minions. DAGGOTH Now, create a Drone and start gathering resources.[/quote]

If you want examples of a sim game with a central avatar, Harvest Moon is a pretty obvious example. It's a farming sim, you are the farmer, you plant and water and harvest the vegetables, and you buy and breed the livestock.