Since your game i set in the dawn on man, you could put the element of being the first to do something. The inventor of some technology, the discoverer of a phenomenon (magic?), the first one to meet a god.

I would like being the first to discover magic, in other games they're always talking about the ancient wizards who were so powerful and unraveled the arcane secrets, or the prophets who were contacted by gods and got something taught to them.

In a paleolithic setting you could have magic based on rock painting, ritual dancing, music and fire.

Hmm.. Inventing fire would be nice :P
Or the wheel...

I've previously worked on a project (an rpg) where gameplay lasted about 4-5 hours and was sort of a long prequel to a strategy game. When becoming "the king" you'd have to claim back the world from the villain through a turn-based strategy troops management game where you raised more troops and fought on several fronts etc.

A long of genre hybridation tries to do it wrong (all-at-once) whereas I like sequencing ideas.

If you have a look at the Romancing Saga series you'll see there is such an element oscillating between a simple RTS and a classic RPG. It keeps things fresh.

I have to confess this thread is pretty big. Each post is very detailed and after a while I got hit with the TL:DR syndrome, but I have skimmed through a lot of posts and I haven't seen anyone emphasize on rewarding the player for exploring the world.

Things you can do:

1.Hidden Story Missions built for Higher Levels

2. Hidden Boss Battles built for Higher Levels

3. Physically changing the world as the player completes tasks/missions in the game to create new missions and reasons to revisit places in the world

What would be the point of going to Mordor when Sauron pops up again after a week?

You're supposed to go to Angband, and take on Melkor. When you get back, you discover that Melkor's snivelling little henchman, Sauron has setup camp in the wilds of the east in some place called Mordor...

yes, you need a never ending stream of bad guys - different bad guys.

I think the lack of decay might have something to do with it. Let's say your skills wear off or an enemy retakes positions if you are no longer there to support the friendlies. This would give the players more to do since he/she would have to keep skills fresh and enemies at bay.

skills wear off. only seen that modeled once. Oblivion when you go to jail for a LONG time. but its very good. and realistic. if i hit 100 on blade skill, then start working on my bow skills. if all i do is bow for a couple months then my blade surely would go down to say 95 or 97 or maybe even 90. I should definitely be bested by the champion who spent the last two months keeping their blade at 100.

skills wear off. i think that one's going in. it will dovetail nicely with the weapon training actions. where's my todo list!?! <g>

hmm, but the rate. the relation between experience and bonus in caveman is usually the "magic formula": bonus = sqrt ( exp / exp_for_1st_level ) where exp for 1st level has been defined for the purposes of caveman as 50 experience points (in some skill). researching a skill boosts your exp in that skill by 50 points if successful. maybe have a skill go down by 1 exp per day. but that may be too harsh. other than research the only way to get exp is by undertaking actions that use a skill. but successfully completing an action usually only gets you one experience point, at most 2 or maybe 5, there may be one 10 in there somewhere.

decay in the security of borders. as part of the daily "gods changing the map", not only do waterholes and berry bushes come and go, but occupants of caves and rock shelters changes and friendly and hostile huts come and go. so once you've established a base at some shelter, temporary or permanent, and cleared out the nearby hostiles to reduce the chance of hostile raids, and to eliminate their drain on nearby resources, you still need to patrol the area and keep a vigil in case some new bad guys show up. if a new hostile hut pops up, you'll never know it til some band member spots it, or you infer its existence from depleted resources and increased hostile raiding.

so decay of border security is already handled by the modeling of the normal comings and goings in the world. change, spoilage, wear and tear, and weathering are modeled for everything. but not decay of skills (yet).

Another of my opinions is that if the story is constructed as non-linear fragments, the possibilities become endless for expansions, even micro-expansions, and are not limited by a linear continuous story.

not sure i follow...

ok, at the moment no storyline - yet.

so i implement a branching storyline? is that what you mean? its not, is it? you mean multiple independant stories?

right now i have a really in depth rpg engine with no story - almost like a blank canvas waiting for a Michelangelo or a DaVinci to show up.

whatever i do with storyline stuff, it will almost definitely be optional.

Another exciting opportunity made possible only recently with newer processors is real-time procedural generation of quality content.

already got that one down. the whole thing is randomly generated procedurally. and its sufficiently large you'd be hard pressed to visit each of the 6.25 million 5 x 5 mile map squares in the world. and given the new realistic automapping distances, you could still miss things, as you now need to be within visual range of a landmark to automap it. so small stuff like tarpits and huts could be missed without a thorough examination of each map square.

one of the big limiting factors is the time period and technology available. since there's no neolithic stuff, you can't just start generating buildings and such willy nilly. you're really limited to basic shelters, stone age tools, and wild animals as the lego blocks with which to build / generate gameplay experiences. the hut is (and will be) the only building in the game. even stonehenge is too new.

Another of my opinions is that if the story is constructed as non-linear fragments, the possibilities become endless for expansions, even micro-expansions, and are not limited by a linear continuous story.

not sure i follow...

ok, at the moment no storyline - yet.

so i implement a branching storyline? is that what you mean? its not, is it? you mean multiple independant stories?

right now i have a really in depth rpg engine with no story - almost like a blank canvas waiting for a Michelangelo or a DaVinci to show up.

whatever i do with storyline stuff, it will almost definitely be optional.

think they are talking multiple smaller storylines. kind of like how Elder Scrolls games have faction quests that follow one storyline.

A sitcom or anime with cavemen might be awesome for me.

Oh, you would have loved the first version! when you didn't take care of your caveman, they'd bitch at you (you the player). they'd look at the camera, stamp their feet, shake their fists, spew caveman gibberish, and have a little temper tantrum. whenever anything went wrong they'd bitch. basically its was a message routine, like an OK dialog box. but when the message was bad, the code would use something like bitchani("No more food!"); and you'd get this little temper tantrum from your avatar cause they ate all their berries. i do plan to keep the bitchani(). but none of the canned animations are in yet. for now, when you do an action for example, it just displays a message saying what your're doing, and your progress, and shows the world in the background. when you speed up the simulation to complete an action, you see the world go by in time-lapse photography, like HG wells in his time machine.

But, it really depends what kind of story you personally want to tell. It's really hard (and a bad idea) to write a story of a type you don't love. If you truly want to write a story that is a hero's journey type, then that's what you need to look at examples of.

well, like i said, right now its more or less a blank canvas. so it seemed to me the logical thing to do was to add one or more optional storylines to pursue. its a valiid gameplay feature for the game type, and can be done without breaking the realism, believability, and paleo-setting of the game.

but as for what story to tell? absolutely no idea. thats pretty sad isn't it? for 10 years i was the DM who's world everyone wanted to play in, and now i have words, and no stories to tell.

I could probably use a little help here with terminology. i never was good at keeping things like plot, theme, motif, etc straight. and thinking of examples for things like "action" (probably cause i don't get into action flicks too much. when i want action, i watch war movies. cops and robbers is child's play compared to war.).

low fantasy - whats that ?

adventure - rambo eh?

comendy - can be hard to write. but i used to be the class clown, so i might have a fighting chance.

romance - i need to get the romance and mating modeling in there. but i dont want it to be contrived like the Sims. i'll probably need to start a new topic for that design.

sitcom - situation based comedy - the nerdy artist and the he-man warrior as odd couple band members for example.

thats a really good qustion, what stories do i want to tell?

well, given that the inspriattion for the game was "wouldn't it be cool if there was a game where you could make a stone knife and take on a saber tooth tiger?",

i'd have to say that i didn't set out to tell any story at all. i guess i set out to build a simulator where you could make stone age tools and hunt stone age animals.

so now i have this really neat simulator of an entire paleo-continent. but story-wise its a blank canvas.

actually i've always been pretty good at story telling, so i guess my natural response (feeling bad and bold and all that) would be, "well, what kind of story would you like to hear?"

seems to me that one answer that should be included is "high-fantasy". its practially de-regeur. done to death, probably, but still expected.

to that i take it you would add comedy. romance, and action. and combos thereof too i assume.

what stories do i want to tell?

jeez, man, now i really gotta think!

you're the writer, what do you do when you sit down at the typewriter, staring at that blank page that says "Chapter 1", and nothing happens ?

i suppose you dont sit down to the typewriter til you have something to say, eh?

so whats your process for coming up with something to say? or is more like music where ideas just pop into your head?

when writing music, there's two approaches:

1. you get an idea, and develop it. this is how its usually done.

2. targeted composition, where you set out to write a specific type of song, such as rap, country, rock, metal, ethereal, etc. this is common for jingles and other music written for hire. or to stretch your writing capbilites in new directions.

a skill based action game ;)

sorry, i don't follow. what do you mean?