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.

that would work quite well if there were magic in the game, but there isn't, and as of now there are no plans to include it. many features in the original version were stripped out as unrealistic when the decision was made to go for realism.

likewise, gods make no appearances anywhere. your relations with them do affect things, but its all in the background. if it takes a long time to find fruit and its always rotten, odds are you've fallen out of favor with the god of plants, and should make some sacrifices. think superstitious caveman religions. the 6 gods cover the basics: earth, sky, fire, water, plants, and animals.

being the first to do something.... right now, all firsts are personal firsts. the first time you successfully make a stone knife and no longer have to run from everything you see, you feel like GOD! since everything is based on skills and research, as you progress, you add technological capabilities to your repertoire, things like making fire, making stone knives, flint weapons, clothing, cooked food, etc. so in that respect its all about firsts and new technologies and capabilities. sure you can trade for a bow and arrows, but the ability to make your own when this one wears out? much better! but all firsts are personal firsts. its not like you invent the first stone tipped spear ever or something like that.

if i implemented older hominid species, there might be a possibility to do some true firsts. but there you'd be homo habilis, limited to non-hafted technologies, and invent hafting (a skill in the game), allowing the creation of hafted tools and weapons. but such innovations were usually tens of thousands of years apart. so at most one true advancement per game would be realistic. no research tree possible. not with reserch times measured in 10,000 year increments, and a player lifespan of just 50 to 100 years.

this is the challenge of the design, keeping it realistic, yet fun. if i lost the realism requirement, everything would become so easy. i could do anything i wanted.

but from play testing, it appears the continuity of a realistic VR world has its own appeal. probably the same way that realism in flight simulators enhances the experience.

and its not an experience you get from your typical game. there is no place truly safe. unlike a level based game, such as your typical shooter or fps/rpg, you can't walk up to just outside activation range of a bad guy and see him just standing there waiting to be activated. all encounters are random. just like the real world, anything (within reason) can happen at any time. this is an actual virtual reality world, as spoken of 20-30 years ago, when game designers were just beginning to imagine the possibilities with 3D graphics and virtual world building.

i've probably spent two years just on research.

examples of questions still to be researched:

1. population density, one caveman encounter per hour, or per month?

2. is there an extra health risk from cannibalism ?

overall, i've spent about 5-6 years on the game (3 versions, one never released (v 2.0) ).

needles to say, this is way overkill for your typical shooter or FPSRPG.

but it does provide an immersion that you don't get in those types of games.

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

inventing fire: too old : ( fire was discovered long before homo sapiens (man) came along.

the wheel: too new. : ( neolithic technology

were at that point in time when man, the greatest of the hunter gatherer species, comes along. fire and stone tools have already existed for hundreds of thousands of years. this is the period when cave art, personal ornamentation, primitive nature worship, burial, and terminal resource depletion began. it ended with depletion of megafauna, requiring a shift to agriculture, loss of free time, and poorer nutrition (the neolithic era, the beginning of permanent year-round settlements).

one question. is the player controlling just one in a band/tribe of "cavemen" or are they able to switch between cavemen in one tribe?

if its the first then yea true tech advancement would be totally unrealistic.

but if you controlled a tribe and were able to move from caveman to caveman you could allow for advancements if you included a reproduction system. you already have aging so reproducing within the tribe would allow for children to be born with a boost in skills based on their parents. as well as the tribespeople being able to teach them skills to give them a head start once they became of age. this would also allow you to progress the game much farther than just the 100 year lifespan of one tribesman, and allow for research and even moving into a different Age in history. even allowing for a possible game goal of gaining enough tech knowledge within your tribe to advance to a different Age.

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.

very similar to the two parts of classic D&D: the rpg, and the castle part.

if i go the band alliances and tribes direction (which is technically sort of neolithic), i'd be doing something like that, but it would all be done through the first/third person caveman sim. IE you'd travel to friendly shelters and make alliances with individual band leaders. when it came time to act, you'd get all your band members, and all their pets, hired warriors, and traveling companions, and you'd travel cross country to your ally's shelter. there your ally would join you with his band members and such. then you'd all travel to the hostile shelter, where a big battle with say 40-50 combatants would ensue, first person, real time.

the scenario i just described above is perfectly valid for the game. such things did happen. its when you get to the point of having lots of allies and controlling entire regions that it starts to become neolithic (too modern, organized, and sophisticated). it wasn't until we could no longer simply pick money up off the ground in the garden of eden to survive (hunt and gather) that we had to get organized.

this game is set in the time period prior to that, when man was first 4x'ing the planet. it wasn't until we killed off all the megafauna that we had to resort to things like agro and husbandry, which were much more labor intensive, and required large labor forces, and staying in one place.

there's also the fact that friendly bands (and thus allies) come and go. back then no place was occupied for more than 6 months at a time. there were no permanent settlements of any type whatsoever, we were still a purely nomadic species. so being nomads, the whole concept of controlling territory boils down to temporary disputes with other nomadic bands over local hunting grounds, etc. and odds are they'll be gone in 3 months anyway, having moved on to less contested areas. it appears that this in fact was what drove much of man's expansion across the planet. it seems we had preference for simply moving on rather than contesting claimed territory. and why not? it was a big wide world, unexploited, plenty of good land for everyone. it wasn't until we ran out of desirable places to expand to that we started to fight over resources with each other. and we still do it to this day.

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

hidden story missions. there's a possibility. similar to daedra shrine quests in Oblivion.

ok, but higher levels. thats the thing. there are so few conventions from your normal RPG in this game/sim. there are no levels. just experience in skills. your hit points never go up! how that for weird in a RPG? last time i saw that was in Traveller.

i think that i'd have to make such quests accessible to anyone, but obviously too difficult for all but the best to attempt

i've had a bit of a struggle with the concept of bosses. in this case, a boss would be a particularly old, nasty, huge, and famous Mammoth bull or something like that. but other than the occasional "somewhat larger than average" animal, or the particularly skilled warrior, nothing else really fits.

i HAVE contemplated "great hunt" quests, where you'd go after some particularly nasty critter for a big trophy, such as an elasmotherium horn, or the tusks of an imperial mammoth. for the mammoth one, i'd have to implement 2 or more people carrying one object somehow. one person could probably carry an elasmo horn (barely).

the gods change the map every day. resources, friendlies and hostiles come and go. even the terrain changes. not elevation, although i could for the earthquake natural disaster, but vegetation does change with climate: jungle-> woods - > savanah -> tall grass -> prairie -> scrub -> dirt- > desert, and back. there's also resource depletion (and renewal), which forces you to move on, or range further to bring back supplies. as a result, between all the changes in vegetation, resources, and neighbors, there's a constant need to explore. in the long term play test game i'm running, i've been exploring along a stream i found. I have a temporary wood shelter in the woods with rocks and a stream, all in the same map square (wood, stone, and clean water in one map square is unusual). I've been exploring looking for a more permanent shelter such as a cave or rock shelter. i've traveled 100 miles west and back along the stream, and followed it about 50 miles east so far. it as at that point that i figured out that cave and rock shelter density was too low.

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

gotcha.

this is my line of thought too. multiple optional storyline campaigns, linear most likely, but branching could also be done.

the one thing i don't like about storyline campaigns is the canned content, hard coded, zero-replayability factor. if i ever did a shooter, everything would be as random as possible. what can i say, i'm selfish. i don't build games for others to play, i build games for ME to play!. so obviously, anything hard coded won't do cause i'll already know what's going to happen. I haven't built games for others since my serious days as a DM (1977-1982 or so). but my world _was_ the world everyone wanted to play in - always! i almost never got to play, cause all the other DMs would rather play in my world. When the PC came along, i saw it as machine that i could program to ref or GM _me_ through a game. but since i was building to play it myself, all the DM'ing had to be random.

i still haven't figured out what to do about canned content.

i think the problem is that i'm a gamer first, a developer second, a coder 3rd, a musician 4th, and an artist 5th.

as a gamer first, canned content and zero replayability are against my religion.

from a gamer point of view, canned content is ok, but it can't be the prime gameplay experience due low/zero replayability.

i saw one posting where the size of the world was designed to give 20-40 hours of canned content non-replayable gameplay. most likely a AAA type title too. estimated price point $60 (?). thats $1.50 to $3.00 per hour of entertainment. an incredibly poor value.

I'm now experiencing the same thing in Oblivion. Once you've done all the quests, you see the weaknesses of the game world behind them. The world is really only a backdrop for the canned quests.

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

gotcha.

this is my line of thought too. multiple optional storyline campaigns, linear most likely, but branching could also be done.

the one thing i don't like about storyline campaigns is the canned content, hard coded, zero-replayability factor. if i ever did a shooter, everything would be as random as possible. what can i say, i'm selfish. i don't build games for others to play, i build games for ME to play!. so obviously, anything hard coded won't do cause i'll already know what's going to happen. I haven't built games for others since my serious days as a DM (1977-1982 or so). but my world _was_ the world everyone wanted to play in - always! i almost never got to play, cause all the other DMs would rather play in my world. When the PC came along, i saw it as machine that i could program to ref or GM _me_ through a game. but since i was building to play it myself, all the DM'ing had to be random.

i still haven't figured out what to do about canned content.

i think the problem is that i'm a gamer first, a developer second, a coder 3rd, a musician 4th, and an artist 5th.

as a gamer first, canned content and zero replayability are against my religion.

from a gamer point of view, canned content is ok, but it can't be the prime gameplay experience due low/zero replayability.

i saw one posting where the size of the world was designed to give 20-40 hours of canned content non-replayable gameplay. most likely a AAA type title too. estimated price point $60 (?). thats $1.50 to $3.00 per hour of entertainment. an incredibly poor value.

I'm now experiencing the same thing in Oblivion. Once you've done all the quests, you see the weaknesses of the game world behind them. The world is really only a backdrop for the canned quests.

Skyrim added a random quest generation system. wasn't great or anything kill this <badguyType> leader in random dungeon, bring these items to quest giver, assault this character(have even heard it make you assault your pc's wife lol) and so on. but it did add a bit of replayability.

1.50 to 3.00 per entertainment hr is not really that poor of a value. just look at movies now days. they are 15 to 30 dollars and only give about 2hrs of entertainment so the value per hr for them is usually between 8 to 12 which is like 5 times as high. and in those you cant even do things differently like you can in a game. at least in a game you can approach the content from a different angle, whether its different skill set or even mindset(stealth vs run and gun).

one question. is the player controlling just one in a band/tribe of "cavemen" or are they able to switch between cavemen in one tribe?

no tribes, too big, too new (early neolithic at the oldest). this is at least 50,000 years before that, when we first arrived on the scene. all you have are small bands of hunter gatherers scattered here and there, chasing the fresh fruit and game. occasionally settling down in one spot for a few weeks or months, then moving on once the fishing isn't so good, or the waterhole dries up, or the game encounters decrease, or they get the dreaded "no more resources in this area!" message when the try to gather or find something.

most bands were family based. but i don't have romance and mating in the game yet.

you start with one caveman in your band. you can get up to a maximum of 10 cavemen in you band. when you have more than one band member, you can tab between them at any time with the tab key, even tab from one to another during combat. even if its 10 different band members in 10 different combats going on at once in 10 different places in the game world. AI takes over for band members the player is not currently controlling. but the AI only fights, it does not trigger actions on the parts of band members - no "freewill" like in the sims. You must tab around to make them eat drink, move, fasttravel, etc. In the original version, it was a god game interface like the sims, and you could queue up actions from menus. so objects didn't have to be onscreen to queue up their actions. so you could queue up "move to berry bushes, pick berries, move to cave" for a band member, then tab to the next band member and run them while the first one gathered berries. now its first person. actions are triggered by selecting things in the environment with the select key (the spacebar, like in any good shooter). so its no longer possible to queue up actions.

but if you controlled a tribe and were able to move from caveman to caveman you could allow for advancements if you included a reproduction system. you already have aging so reproducing within the tribe would allow for children to be born with a boost in skills based on their parents. as well as the tribespeople being able to teach them skills to give them a head start once they became of age. this would also allow you to progress the game much farther than just the 100 year lifespan of one tribesman, and allow for research and even moving into a different Age in history. even allowing for a possible game goal of gaining enough tech knowledge within your tribe to advance to a different Age.

Skyrim added a random quest generation system. wasn't great or anything kill this leader in random dungeon, bring these items to quest giver, assault this character(have even heard it make you assault your pc's wife lol) and so on. but it did add a bit of replayability.

yes, i've heard of the quest gen in Skyrim, although i have yet to pick up a copy. Assault your wife! that's almost worth buying it right there! <g>.

a quest gen that is as large and in-depth and realistic as possible (no whack you wife missions) is already under construction:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/638940-types-of-quests/

but the "high level" gameplay question is still unanswered. once you've got your band going good, then what? take over the world? or some little corner of it? or while away your days, hunting, fishing, and mating? buy caveman v4.0 for the better graphics and VR headgear support? wait for the much demanded neolithic add-on module?

1.50 to 3.00 per entertainment hr is not really that poor of a value. just look at movies now days. they are 15 to 30 dollars and only give about 2hrs of entertainment so the value per hr for them is usually between 8 to 12 which is like 5 times as high. and in those you cant even do things differently like you can in a game. at least in a game you can approach the content from a different angle, whether its different skill set or even mindset(stealth vs run and gun).

true, but compare that to something like total war or panzer general or the sims or a decent citybuiler. games that can take six months to use up if you're into them.

different bites for different likes as they say.

i started on tabletop wargames, then went to pen and paper rpgs. things like pong and mario brothers were (and are) childish arcade games to me. then came the PC and stuff like commander keen. more childish arcade stuff. i was playing Jet, by sublogic, and splashing bogies, and MS flight sim v1.0 1916 option. then the guys who make keen went 1st person with a title called wolf 3d. same game, different viewpoint. but it was a more realistic simulation, and that was the key. even i played it. hell i even paid good money for doom II. i think you know the rest of the story....

but the popularity of shooters has made it so they only need to compete with other mainstream forms of entertainment for the casual gamer's dollar.

as a more hard core gamer, i find shooters somewhat lite, and less challenging than hard core flight sims (for example), sort of like a salad vs a burger, or chinese food where you're hungry again after an hour. and i find the hours of entertainment per dollars spent most unfavorable compared to more in-depth titles. what's the point of harder difficulty if i've already been through it, and its hard coded , and the same every time, and i know what to expect, nothing changes, it just takes longer and you die more often. right now i'm experiencing that in dungeons in Oblivion. i'm at the point now where i increase difficulty level after every kill.

I'm now experiencing the same thing in Oblivion. Once you've done all the quests, you see the weaknesses of the game world behind them. The world is really only a backdrop for the canned quests.

this sort of makes it less like an rpg, and more like a really big shooter.

that's really what it is, isn't it?

ok, i know the game was made by writers, not rpg players. thats obvious. just read all the damn books.

then they wrote some linear mission based storyline campaigns that fit into their world history, and built enough fps / rpg-ish engine to support it.

interesting.

are there any REAL rpg games out there? where you build the world FIRST ? THEN you add the dungeon modules?

elder scrolls didn't start out that way though did it?

i would assume that at first it was made by a coder and artist who were rpg players, and then it took off, got bought out, re-designed with each version to broaden appeal, etc.