I haven't seen anyone emphasize on rewarding the player for exploring the world.

actually, thats in there too.

when you start a new game, you get to chose 3 interests for your caveman. things like combat, arts/crafts, and TRAVEL.

whenever you do anything related to your interests, you get a mood boost. so cavemen into travel get a mood boost just from wandering around checking stuff out. other cavemen (those into combat) get a mood boost when the engage in combat, those into art and crafts get a mood boost when they're making something (like me and building games in real life <g>).

What is your experience in programming? Specifically with languages such as C and C++, not so much Java, C#, BASIC, JavaScript, etc.

The reason I ask is because there really is no out-of-the-box engine that is optimized, or even has the generators for, the type of real-time processing you are talking about. Sure, it is very possible and plausible, but that just depends on your experience in C/C++.

What is your experience in programming? Specifically with languages such as C and C++, not so much Java, C#, BASIC, JavaScript, etc.

The reason I ask is because there really is no out-of-the-box engine that is optimized, or even has the generators for, the type of real-time processing you are talking about. Sure, it is very possible and plausible, but that just depends on your experience in C/C++.

i started with basic on a sperry rand pc (8088 chip at 4.77 Mhz clock speed) with not one but TWO! (ooh and ahh) 360K floppies, and a CGA card. it belonged to the mother of my best friend in college at the time. I spent about a year working on a text mode D&D game on it.

my first PC was an 8Mhz PC overclocked to 10Mhz (a 286 maybe?) i wrote a number of apps in basic on it.

i got into operating environment software development and switched to pascal for speed. this culminated in writing what was basically xtree pro gold on steroids, and a second mega-app which was essentially windows 95 complete with all the built-in windowing apps you see in microsoft office. the current OS at the time was dos 5.0. This was the first software I ever tried to sell. But i knew nothing about marketing and sold maybe 20 copies.

Then i wrote the world's first star trek flight simulator (in pascal), inventing the genre. the playable demo was a top 10 download on AOL, and checks started pouring in through the mail. just like that i was making 60K a year as an indie gamedev. i got side by side reviews with castle wolfenstein 3D and 4 other titles as best of shareware 1990 in computer gaming world magazine.

I later switched to C for even more speed.

for a time, the c was supplemented with hand tuned assembler.

c++ came along, but offered no great speed enhancements. i had already learned ADT and OO design as part of my software engineering BS at OSU, and used them, so c++ offered little advantage. i use a c++ compiler for the stronger compile time type checking. but the code itself is still straight fast simple procedural C, static data structures when possible, etc.

i was about to licence rend386, but MS bought the company and took it off the market. they then proceeded to turn it into directx v1.0, which they released 1 year later. when they took rend386 off the market i was forced to write my own perspective correct texture mapped poly engine (write my own version of directx), which of course, i did. you do what you have to. rome was not built in a day, and sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make a REAL mayonnaise.

so i've been coding pc's and pc games since about 1981 (32 years). and i've been using c probably since 1990 or so, so that's 23 years of c programming experience.

caveman is probably something like the 12th or 15th game i've made for the PC, out of which only the first two were never released. The star trek flight sim was the third PC game i ever made.

but Caveman has become an even bigger hit than SIMtrek / SIMSpace.

This probably isn't what you were aiming for, but it came to mind right after reading the title:

If you start off designing an RPG without levels, you may find it easier to give the player things to do after the end of the game.

The typical goal of a lot of RPGs (aside from completing story) is to undertake tasks to level up continuously. Since most rpgs have some sort of a level limit, this goal eventually runs dry, leaving the player with a feeling of lack of progress in doing much else.

My opinion on the matter is that if you don't make leveling up a goal from the start, you may be able to acclimate the player to getting the sense of progress from other accomplishments, thus leaving more options for end game.

Not sure if any of this will fit with your setting, but some of my ideas on this have been:

1 Allow player to receive training from hard to find and difficult to reach people/locations, to permanently improve their stats or combat or learn a new skill. You can then add more and more such locations to further challenge players to improve their characters by seeking out such things. Challenges could be more than just 'fight x number of y' - but things like jumping puzzles, environmental hazards (snowstorms that can freeze you, random magma flows) or a combination of the above.

2. Make exploration interesting in more than just a visual way. Give the player some basic (even if not fully complete) ability to interact with the environment. For example being able to 'search' through at the current player's location in the water bed in a lake or river for a chance to find something useful - where certain areas are more likely to yield a useful resource (gold, lost items that could be returned, or.. even just a sharpened obsidian shard that can be used to fashion a new spear) Mix in some random negative elements like searching in some areas can result in being bitten by an unknown insect and have hazardous effects

3. If you have a story with a clear end, make some, even trivial, post-story-end follow up quests that only trigger once main story is complete. Like if you happen to rescue some minor npc along the story, make them become available at some location (though not directly indicated to player that they are, meaning player would have to visit them at their own initiative, not due to quest log of 'Visit npcX') to talk to, whereupon they give you something unique. Bonus points if you tie that in with above idea for distant location training of skills.

4. Make a system that allows open ended expansion of skills. I mean, a lot of games have very clearly defined skill trees or something akin to that, where you know in advance how many points and skills you can obtain. It makes games very calculable in my opinion, and grouped with a leveling system with a potential max level, gives a very clear idea of "I've beat this game" feeling to players. If you simply had some list of skills that didn't give indication of whether or not you could learn more (couple with idea 1 above), a player may not always be 100% sure if he's truly discovered/completed everything.

Hmm, anyway, hope this didn't get horribly off topic.

If you start off designing an RPG without levels, you may find it easier to give the player things to do after the end of the game.
The typical goal of a lot of RPGs (aside from completing story) is to undertake tasks to level up continuously. Since most rpgs have some sort of a level limit, this goal eventually runs dry, leaving the player with a feeling of lack of progress in doing much else.
My opinion on the matter is that if you don't make leveling up a goal from the start, you may be able to acclimate the player to getting the sense of progress from other accomplishments, thus leaving more options for end game.

this was a major concern when i was first creating the game. with no overall experience points, no classes, and no levels in those classes, some other means of tracking improvement was required. but more importantly, it had to be a never ending improvement curve that grew exponentially to maintain game balance.

you know the idea, 2x the xp to get to 2nd level as is it to get to 1st level cause you're stronger.

thus the "magic formula" as i call it:

bonus = sqrt( exp / exp_for_1st_level )

all you do is decide how many experience points it should be to get the first "level up", plug it into the formula, and you have an instant formula for converting exp to level (or bonus). works with any rpg, any stat.

this is the method used in the game, so there's no limit to the exp or bonus for a skill in the game. IE you can basically "level up" forever. but exponentially increasing "level up" costs guarantees that bonuses/levels won't get too big and ruin game balance.

as for fixating on "leveling up" in the game, this only occurs when trying to get the minimum skills for an action.

so you start the game, and start exploring, looking for food and water sources. so you find some water, just a dirty waterhole, probably dries up in summer, but at least you won't die from dehydration now. so, having secured water, you explore for food sources (and maybe a better water source). after a bit, you come upon woods, jungle, berry bushes, or fruit trees. free fruit and nuts for the taking! so you go running up to the berry bush, select it with the spacebar, and click on "pick berries" from the popup menu.

"Need more plantlore!" is the message you get back. BOOM, now you're fixated on learning plantlore (getting plantlore experience points - "leveling up" in plantlore). So you select the berry bushes again, and click on "learn plantlore". so then your caveman spends a couple hours checking out berry bushes, figuring out whats safe to eat, etc. If they make their "success check" at the end (influenced by intelligence), they get 50 plantlore exp. well, 50 plantlore is all you need to pick berries, so when they get the "you learned something new!" message, they try to pick berries, and it works. now as long as they have at least 50 plantlore xp, they can always pick berries and gather nuts.

so fixating on leveling up only occurs until you get the minimum exp in some skill required for some action you want to do. the are prerequisite tools, parts, and skills for all actions. when you attempt an action, it tells you if you don't have something you need (such as a tool, or more plantlore experience). since you start with zero skills, this means that most new actions require research first. with armor making and jewelry making being some of the most skill intensive actions in the game. drinking and eating are about the only actions you can do with no skills. note i said eating, not finding food. that requires skills. so drinking is really the only thing you can do right off the bat when you start a new game, without learning anything new.

Then the only other motivation for increased experience is better bonuses. researching stoneworking and hafting and woodworking to a high degree, so you can create spears of > 100% quality. Or training with your weapon of preference to increase your combat bonuses. Or practicing your husbandry skills, cause your going to try to trap and tame a hippidion (proto horse), and you want to succeed before he eventually escapes captivity.

1 Allow player to receive training from hard to find and difficult to reach people/locations, to permanently improve their stats or combat or learn a new skill

advanced training quests like in Oblivion. that could work. anyone can teach anyone anything at any time. but not everyone has more exp in a skill that you do. and once you get a lot of exp in a skill, no NPC will have more exp and be able to teach you anything. Enter the advanced training quest for "high level" characters.

2. Make exploration interesting in more than just a visual way. Give the player some basic (even if not fully complete) ability to interact with the environment. For example being able to 'search' through at the current player's location in the water bed in a lake or river for a chance to find something useful - where certain areas are more likely to yield a useful resource (gold, lost items that could be returned, or.. even just a sharpened obsidian shard that can be used to fashion a new spear) Mix in some random negative elements like searching in some areas can result in being bitten by an unknown insect and have hazardous effects

everything in the environment is interactive, like in the sims.

when outdoors, here's what you can select with the spacebar and interact with:

fires

shelters

rafts

bedding

storage pits

traps

landmarks

dropped objects

dead animals

captured animals

subdued animals

dead cavemen

captured caveman (turned off right now)

subdued cavemen (turned off right now)

friendly cavemen

band members

permanent shelters

berry bushes

fruit trees

rocks

scrub plants

trees in woods

jungle trees

trees in savanah

volcanoes

stars

rain

clouds

flowing and standing water

shoreline

ocean

tarpits

grasslands

prairies

if you don't click on any of the above, you get the general actions menu, stuff you can do anywhere, anytime:

if you select a dropped object, its automatically picked up and added to your inventory (encumberance and container rules allowing).

everything else you select makes a popup menu appear with a list of actions, such as "gather vines" when you select a jungle tree. there are actually about 18 actions on the jungle menu as i recall. if you select nothing (empty space), the general actions menu appears.

the game is basically about survival. and that means securing resource supplies. and that means exploration. explorations is a big part of the game.

usually one explores until one finds a good place to "setup camp" so to speak. then one explores the surrounding area, looking for additional resources beyond the basics of plants to eat, water, and wood and stone for basic tool making. after a while, you deplete the resources, and must move on, or range further afield to bring supplies back to your camp.

3. If you have a story with a clear end, make some, even trivial, post-story-end follow up quests that only trigger once main story is complete. Like if you happen to rescue some minor npc along the story, make them become available at some location (though not directly indicated to player that they are, meaning player would have to visit them at their own initiative, not due to quest log of 'Visit npcX') to talk to, whereupon they give you something unique. Bonus points if you tie that in with above idea for distant location training of skills.

its an open ended world, not story based. but there are plans to add optional storyline campaigns most likely. add-on bonus quests tied to completion of the storyline campaigns is entirely doable.

Like in Oblivion, when you talk to Barius at Cloudruler temple after his major role in the main campaign is over, he teaches you some skills.

When i was testing the misisonflow of the main campaign in Oblivion (at lowest difficulty), i made a majic sword from Barius's sword and Jeoffrey's sigil stone after the battle of Bruma where they both perished (Burd died at bruma too. when Martin died figting off mehrues dagon, i was the only one left. Piner and the other guy at Wenon Priiory died in the attack there. felt kinda lonely).

4. Make a system that allows open ended expansion of skills. I mean, a lot of games have very clearly defined skill trees or something akin to that, where you know in advance how many points and skills you can obtain. It makes games very calculable in my opinion, and grouped with a leveling system with a potential max level, gives a very clear idea of "I've beat this game" feeling to players. If you simply had some list of skills that didn't give indication of whether or not you could learn more (couple with idea 1 above), a player may not always be 100% sure if he's truly discovered/completed everything.

no experience caps. but an exponential cost curve for each "+1 bonus point" or "level".

Hmm, anyway, hope this didn't get horribly off topic.

on the contrary, quite "spot on" as the british would say.

i'm coalating a list of all the ideas in this thread and the related threads that might apply. when i post it, i think you'll recognize a few on the list has having come from your post.

appreciate the suggestions!

like i used to alway put at the bottom of the mail order form for my games:

"Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Suggestions really help us a lot!"

don't know how many cool ideas i got from users that way. lots for sure.

You mentioned health issues related to cannibalism before. Eating human brains gets you kuru, which is much like mad cow syndrome (which happened after they fed cows with cow meat), if you're interested read about kuru.

There's lots of good discussions taking place in here, and many from my primary school of lacking levels to begin with, so I won't really tread there too much.

Two reasons for me to not address lacking levels is that you've already started a heavy amount of development with levels, and that you've already established an infinity system for your level system, if needed, at an increasing difficulty of acquisition.

Instead, I would more start by returning your question with a question:

You ask for a means to continue after a character reaches X level (be that either the "last level" or just very high level under which leveling is too long and tedious to keep the attention of the player exclusively).

My question in return would be, what do you want the player to offer the game system and world at this point?

Another way of stating that is, why does the game need the player at this point; what purpose do they serve to the world?

What is your experience in programming? Specifically with languages such as C and C++, not so much Java, C#, BASIC, JavaScript, etc.

The reason I ask is because there really is no out-of-the-box engine that is optimized, or even has the generators for, the type of real-time processing you are talking about. Sure, it is very possible and plausible, but that just depends on your experience in C/C++.

i started with basic on a sperry rand pc (8088 chip at 4.77 Mhz clock speed) with not one but TWO! (ooh and ahh) 360K floppies, and a CGA card. it belonged to the mother of my best friend in college at the time. I spent about a year working on a text mode D&D game on it.

my first PC was an 8Mhz PC overclocked to 10Mhz (a 286 maybe?) i wrote a number of apps in basic on it.

i got into operating environment software development and switched to pascal for speed. this culminated in writing what was basically xtree pro gold on steroids, and a second mega-app which was essentially windows 95 complete with all the built-in windowing apps you see in microsoft office. the current OS at the time was dos 5.0. This was the first software I ever tried to sell. But i knew nothing about marketing and sold maybe 20 copies.

Then i wrote the world's first star trek flight simulator (in pascal), inventing the genre. the playable demo was a top 10 download on AOL, and checks started pouring in through the mail. just like that i was making 60K a year as an indie gamedev. i got side by side reviews with castle wolfenstein 3D and 4 other titles as best of shareware 1990 in computer gaming world magazine.

I later switched to C for even more speed.

for a time, the c was supplemented with hand tuned assembler.

c++ came along, but offered no great speed enhancements. i had already learned ADT and OO design as part of my software engineering BS at OSU, and used them, so c++ offered little advantage. i use a c++ compiler for the stronger compile time type checking. but the code itself is still straight fast simple procedural C, static data structures when possible, etc.

i was about to licence rend386, but MS bought the company and took it off the market. they then proceeded to turn it into directx v1.0, which they released 1 year later. when they took rend386 off the market i was forced to write my own perspective correct texture mapped poly engine (write my own version of directx), which of course, i did. you do what you have to. rome was not built in a day, and sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make a REAL mayonnaise.

so i've been coding pc's and pc games since about 1981 (32 years). and i've been using c probably since 1990 or so, so that's 23 years of c programming experience.

caveman is probably something like the 12th or 15th game i've made for the PC, out of which only the first two were never released. The star trek flight sim was the third PC game i ever made.

but Caveman has become an even bigger hit than SIMtrek / SIMSpace.

Well, I was definitely NOT expecting that level of expertise.

You have more experience than I do, so my suggestions probably mean little to you. But, I suggest that you develop a system that starts with terrain and has each generation pipeline dependent on the last, creating a functioning system (i.e. the terrain is generated, and a limestone monument might appear in mountains, not a swamp).

this is the method used in the game, so there's no limit to the exp or bonus for a skill in the game. IE you can basically "level up" forever. but exponentially increasing "level up" costs guarantees that bonuses/levels won't get too big and ruin game balance.

That's awesome if I'm understanding correctly. So I can basically train up a given skill forever, getting better and better but taking more and more time to do so?

so you go running up to the berry bush, select it with the spacebar, and click on "pick berries" from the popup menu.

"Need more plantlore!" is the message you get back.

This kind've bugs me. Its sort've like the invisible walls used by some games to keep you corralled into "playable" game space. If I want to pick some round red things hanging off a bush, let me pick some round red things hanging off a bush!

In all seriousness though, this doesn't seem to jive for a game that you've stated is grounded/constrained by realism to a large degree.

I would've thought you'd do it something like this:

Player goes running up to a berry bush selecting it with the spacebar and clicking on "pick berries".

*game determines (either now, or when sector was created but no reason it couldn't be on the fly) if the berries are harmful, helpful or neutral (no effect)*

*game checks player's Plant Lore skill versus this type of berry bush and finds either: player has no clue, player has some idea, player knows this bush*

*game informs player either: You are certain these berries are edible, you are uncertain if these are edible, you have no idea if these are edible.*

Player then makes decision to eat the berries based on degree of knowledge of berry bush versus degree of hunger (i.e., I'm starving so it's worth the risk of getting sick).

If the player dumps the berries because he feels it's not worth the risk (i.e., his Plant Lore wasn't high enough to get "certain" feedback) then his Plant Lore can still go up minutely.

If the player however EATS the berries, either way his Plant Lore is going to go up a lot more. Especially for THAT type of bush! He's either going to get sick or he's not.

I dunno'. Just seems a rather contrived way to do things. And again, especially in a game that's striving for realism.

when you attempt an action, it tells you if you don't have something you need (such as a tool, or more plantlore experience). since you start with zero skills, this means that most new actions require research first. with armor making and jewelry making being some of the most skill intensive actions in the game.

I get the lack of tool notification. You want to get some stone or ore? Well it's not happening with your bare hands. You want to shape some ingots after heating them up in a forge/furnace? Ditto the bare hands thing. BUT! Again with the research. I really think you're putting the cart before the horse here. You should probably separate research from ability. It seems like you're confusing them conceptually. Bear with me...

If I want to pick berries to eat I don't need to know how to do it. I go up to the berry bush, I pull the berries off, and I eat them. Action Complete.

If I want to forge a sword...now THERE'S something I can't simply walk up and do. I wouldn't even know what a sword WAS, let alone how to forge one.

Likewise if I want to gather nuts why should I have to have some kind of skill? I see some local fauna with bushy tails nibbling on some nuts and I get the idea that they're edible. So I grab some off the ground and try it. Action Complete!

Likewise killing animals for food. Sure my chances are going to SUCK MAMMOTH PRIVIES until/unless I've developed some kind of trapping or combat skills, but why would I not even be able to attempt it? Which you haven't come right out and said, but you've implied it.

Again with the I dunno'. Perhaps you can go into more detail about how you're breaking down Skills, Research, ability, etc. I can understand completely how one might need to RESEARCH something before you can even attempt it. Like a Tech Tree or something. But I'm at odds with your example of berry picking for starters as far as requiring any kind of research. Berry Picking SKILL, by all means, which could affect what % of edible berries you gather per unit time or something.

And maybe you just casually lumped everything into the paradigm of Research+Action=Finished without thinking some of them through. If that's the case I suggest rethinking some of the more basic actions and making them more of a Action+Finished=Skill Increase paradigm. Like gathering, or basic combat.

Do you have a "Tech Tree"?

Please don't take all of the above the wrong way. I've been reading through most/all of your threads on this game and I'm super impressed/excited. I'd love to see more screenshots and/or movies of stuff in action. Sounds like a really awesome job so far and I wish you all the best. So yeah I mean all of the above in the greatest spirit of constructive criticism possible.

Take care.