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 capabilities in new directions.

Apologies for the delay. Ha, yes an angry stomping caveman complaining about a lack of food would have amused me. I like your sitcom example too. You could have a spoiled chieftan's child, and a strutting jock who is the best hunter, and someone who is a total clutz, and the friendly flirty person who adores the opposite sex and couldn't be monogamous to save their life, and a spacey half-senile old person, and someone who has an obsession with collecting shiny things, and a wise kindly grandparent, and a dissatisfied greasy teen who can't stand being subordinate to someone older, and the bored person with a sadistic sense of humor who causes misunderstandings and pranks... Half the reason Sims bores me is that the characters don't have clear, consistent personalities.

Low fantasy is stories that include magic (usually) but are not all about war, serious politics, or saving the world. The Jim Henson movie Labyrinth is low fantasy; My Little Pony is low fantasy; most Piers Anthony is low fantasy, as is the fantasy portion of Alan Dean Foster's work, and many of the more comical superhero stories and stories about magical schools are low fantasy. In tabletop land low fantasy would include things like BESM and Cute & Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters, though those are intended to be flexibly usable for science fiction as well. But, if you don't want to have magic in your world that kind of rules out both low and high fantasy as options.

You could theoretically find some 'players' to tell you what stories they would like to be told in your game. I expect they would ask for less realistic stories than you want to tell though; either fantasy or stories where the player gets to invent everything from fire and farming to pottery and architecture. That's kind of what we've been trained to expect from prehistoric stories.

As far as how I personally come up with story ideas, did you see my brainstorming map thingy in the writing forum? That map is new but it represents my self-knowledge of my interests and subjects I like stories about. Most of my story concepts emerge from that, usually by combining two or three elements. I have recurrent themes: mainly prejudice, founding something new, and changing one's appearance or shape to influence a situation. I have only one story set as far back in history as you are talking about (and it's pr0n) but it has those same themes: someone weird-looking is born into the tribe, gets treated badly due to prejudice, a love interest shows up from another tribe, together they found a new tribe of misfits rescued from various places, and the new tribe seems to be developing a new philosophy/cult. I have a second story set at the time when farming and towns are just starting to take over from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that one also has similar themes: there has been ongoing racial conflict from the town of blond-haired people who hunt big plains animals as a group and cultivate fruit trees, and the tribe of black-haired lone-hunters who live in the forest nearby. There are half a dozen major characters of both races, including one halfblood and one outcast among his own tribe. They all have their own personal concerns, mostly romantic, but by the end of the story the two people have found a more cooperative way to live together and started to integrate, both in terms of interbreeding and in terms of their economies and governments starting to merge. I really haven't found any way to adapt this kind of story to a sandboxy nonlinear game, though it can work as a more linear/branching story for a sim, RPG, or adventure game.

BTW I enjoyed that comment about me being the yin to most people's yang around here.

What a project! Isn't Norman Barrows multiple persons? :-)

My 1 cent: As you are going to introduce a lot of skills I think Tom Sawyer's approach might be used :-).

Implementation: Skills could be grouped by purpose, for example to farming skills, hunting skills, wandering skills, fighting skills etc. Based on the question form at the begining the player would get some of these groups visible and get some of skills available to use (even as a 0 level of skill). Btw: how do you address the activity if the player has no skills at the begining? I mean clicking to stone can mean anything from picking to attacking the stone.)

And now back to the implementation: you let the player pay the experience for unlocking the other groups of skills. This way the player would not be flooded with a huge amount of skills as he is "forced" to soak the complexity continuously and yet he or she can feel the advancement.

This would probably require a modification for the terain generation engine. What I mean, if from the question form I will get not farming group of skill I probably have to live in a place where there is enough of food just to collect (at least for some time for the game purposes). Or for example do I need a warm cloath crafting if I live in Afrika? In the other words the character should be prepared with his skills for his starting location to survive.

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.

Thanks for the tip!

I still haven't decided whether to add it or not, i suppose i should for completeness. A tactful way to implement it was discussed in this thread:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/639592-political-correctness-and-captured-prisoners-in-rpg/

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?

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).

Yes, generating the map was a major piece of work. Probably a month, maybe only 3 weeks. flowing water took a whole week. It sort of uses a blob or chain shaped blob approach. start with flat ocean, add blobs of land, raise mountains, continents and islands out of the oceans. then cover it with vegetation based on climate, and then add water sources and model the flow of the water from the sources to the sea to determine flowing water paths (creeks, streams, and rivers). The algos are not scientifically based. it uses that technique, i forget what its called, where you basically "fake it" well enough that you don't get any nonsense results. its not really modeling, its more like trying to approximate or fake the effects of having modeled something correctly. its used in graphics coding by some very talented creative types. there's a name for it, but i forget what it is. I didn't set out to do it that way, i was just trying to get a decent map as easily as possible, which i suppose is the same thing.

it models 5 levels of elevation, 8 types of vegetation coverage, 6 types of standing water, 4 types of flowing water, berry bush fields, fruit tree groves, rock outcroppings, cliffs, canyons, volcanoes, tar pits, caves, and rock shelters.

it uses a heightmap function to return the height of the ground at any location in the world. the value returned is a function of elevation and any water, cliffs, canyons, and tar pits present. the formulas are based on superimposed sin and cos waves with different amplitudes and periods for different elevations, on top of which are superimposed terrain specific mods for depressions for water, tar pits, etc (average of default heightmap and slope to zero over 100 foot radius), or special heightmap formulas (step functions) for cliffs. canyons are inverted impassable mountains with a shorter period to the sin and cos waves, and elevation dropped by 100 feet.

but i'd like to get into some perlin or other methods of generating heightmaps for even more realistic hills and mountains, etc.

i finally got my heightmap seam welding code working, so now i can blend the edges of different height maps using different algos together. it'll even blend 4 differnt ones together where they join at a corner. any height map, from any source.

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?

that's correct. you can acquire experience in the 47 or so skills by undertaking actions that use those skills, or by research/training on your own part, or by learning them from a PC or NPC. research, training, and learning usually give you 50 experience points, which is the amount required for a "+1" bonus in a skill, according to the "magic formula" (see post above). a +1 bonus is roughly analogus to 1st level in a "start at level zero" rpg. how a +1 bonus translates into effects in the game depends on the situation. in some places, it may be a %1 increase in the chance of a successful outcome, in other places, it may affect the time required for an action. in most places it does both. the effects of a bonus usually are applied anywhere they make sense. so they may increase your chance to find fruit, reduce the time between success checks, and influence the quality of fruit found, for example. This type of application of bonuses is common throughout the game.

and there is no limit to exp in a skill other than the physical limits of the data structure used (array of ints for skill exp). so you can get up to 2 what is it? billion? trillion? for an int? 2 billion or trillion + experience points.

typical experience points range from zero to a few thousnd, with bonuses usually at +10 or less. but the effect of bonuses is scaled so that large bonus up to 100 or so won't throw things out of whack or make you god.

and the amount of exp you get from learing or training or research is usually only 50 exp. and you usually only get one exp point from doing actions. and the cost of each +1 bonus in a skill goes up exponentially. so it can take a LONG time and LOTS of experience to get a big bonus.

*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.*

I like that approach. its a better way to present the situation to the player. Both menu picks are there, they can stop and try to figure out what they're doing, or just go for it. But it won't deny them the option of going for it.

I wonder how that would work with something like a flint tipped spear?

Right now it just says "need more <whatever> skills!" for all actions. And there are 100 action handlers in the game. That's a lot of messages to change and checks to add for proceeding with actions without the skills required.

But it is a more realistic way to do things.

So how would that work for a flint tipped spear?

"You're not sure you have the skills to do this! Proceed?"

technically, proceeding without skills means either you get lucky (no poison berries, and what you find is nutritious), or you fail.

But you might learn more in the process.

Allowing them to proceed with actions when they don't have the skill prerequisites. Interesting, have to think about that one. I think its going on the todo list for further evaluation.

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.

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!

These two make a good case for being able to attempt actions with no skills. at least some actions that technically require no skills, but that skills could still influence.

Simple stuff like picking berries and eating them.

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.

Now that one, you don't need any skills for. If the first thing you want to do in the game is go up to a Woolly Mammoth, and whack it with your fist, you can. One hit from its tusk and you're dead, but you can punch it if you want to. Personally, I'd recommend a bow, javelins, or atlatl, a really good spear, and a few buddies.

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.

When i was originally prototyping the game back around 2000, it originally didn't have skills, just actions and objects. and the basic cycle was: do A to get B. even with stringing them together, and repeated for all actions and objects, there still seemed to be something lacking. and that something, was essentially, experience points and levels. I had always liked the "no classes" system used in Traveller, and their use of skills instead as a means of player character specialization. So, enter skills, research, and the "magic formula" for converting exp to levels with exponential costs and no limit: level = sqrt(exp / exp for 1st level). then the basic cycle became learn A to do B to get C. and adding in already learning D, and having E and F to learn A gave sufficient layers or depth of gameplay to the "action-reward" feedback loop (or whatever you'd call it).

So originally almost everything required research. its was a sims type god game back then, and more of a game, and less of a simulation. everything was sort of abstracted and pigeon-holed into skills.

But you're right, for simulation purposes, they should be able to try anything, success is another story.

Do you have a "Tech Tree"?

There are prerequisites for all actions. these can include skills, tools, parts, being in a certain type of terrain or location, and stat levels (tired enough to sleep, in a good enough mood to work on fixing that darn spear again, etc).

you can make any object in the game. for each object there are minimum experience levels required in various skills. anywhere from zero to maybe 5 skills. the engine can handle up to 10 types of skills, parts, and tools as prerequisites for making an object or undertaking any action.

so the skill experience points in various skills required for different objects essentially defines a "tech tree". you start say, with wood spears: woodlore and woodworking, a little stonelore and stoneworking to find/make the tools. then you add firemaking skills, and can make fired hardened weapons. then you add hafting and cordage making. and then you can make hafted weapons. add a lot of stoneworking and make a knapping tool (requires boneworking skill), and then you can make Clovis type flint tipped arrows for your bow.

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.

Don't worry, taken as such.

And good ideas too.

i really like the idea of letting them try anything. thats what this "game" is all about, at least this new version. it tries to simulate what it was really like, and you can play it, and see what it was like, and how good you would have been at it.

Its really cool waking up in your little shelter in the morning and looking over at the stream, and an entire little paleo-world beyond. Of course, usually you wake up by being surprised in the middle of the night by an animal encounter.

You die a LOT in this game. It auto-saves every game day at midnight, and save (F7) is down to about 3-4 seconds to save the entire state of everything, with round robin file naming so even a power outage during save won't wipe your savegame. And you save after every achievement. made it to water without dieing? SAVE! got your water back up to 100? SAVE! got your food or mood back up to 100? SAVE! learned something new? SAVE! About to go to sleep? SAVE! (in case you don't live to see tomorrow - happens a lot). "You made a stone knife!" Ooh! definitely save that one! <g>.

I'll post some more screen shots. i have a number of "behind the scenes" screenshots that show it under construction, compare screenshots to real photos, show examples of research info gathered, etc.

Norman,

It sounds to me like your answer to the question is solved by the work you have for creating content.

Meaning, you seem to be solving your issue already in that you are supplying more content to continue interacting with.

I would think this solves the issue since levels aren't really an engine of a game, but a means of interacting with the actual engine of a game - content.