The only concern I would have is that if the life-span is to be played in 2 - 5 hours, the character will be aging very quickly.

Assuming you begin play at 1 yrs old and die at age 80, and this take 5 hours, your character ages 1 year every 3 minutes and 45 seconds. (give or take.)

Seems like you would be under the gun to explore, go on adventures, and do stuff before you got too old.

I liked the ageing process in Pirates. Not only could you decide to age gracefully but you might have to cut your losses and marry the 'not quite so pretty' governor's daughter.
Generally, it was VERY hard to get past 50 so you're game would run from 20-60.
The next stage would be to decide how quickly you want the character to age which will depend on how quickly stats increase.
I am considering 'ageing' as part of an athletics game. The game never stops but, as you get older, you'll get slower and more injury prone. You'll then not be selected for championships or invited to big meetings. The player would be faced with running low-class meetings as a 'has-been' or retire.

Sure, you're right. If you start the game at maybe 20, you'll have more time per year. I guess I'm just saying I would be frustrated if it went something like the Sims, where time just flows unnaturally fast, and before you know it, you aged 7 years just trying to get from one town to another.

I like the idea, but think that maybe it should only focus on 10 - 20 years of your life. You get all your adventuring and treasure-seeking in during your most vital years, and then you either die trying, or just retire with style. Unless you can counter-balance the older years somehow, with it's own unique game-play to cater to your wisdom, rather than your endurance.

Quote:Original post by grbrg
The player will not start at age 1 but at 20 or something like that. If he is careful he will reach 80, maybe even more. That would be five minutes for a year. Do you think this is too fast?

You could cheat a bit here and make the aging process non-dynamic. I.e. rather than have player grow year older every five minutes, you could have a brief "5 years of your life passed" summary of sorts every half an hour or so. As a side effect, this would make the effect of aging more noticeable since our performance doesn't change so much just over one year...

Harvest Moon did the "Six Years Later..." thing, and I still felt cheated. I'd rather see gameplay cover the high points, and have time lapses be available to the player based on his decisions. That doesn't make any sense. Let me try again, with an example.

You're twenty years old, you're bored with your town/city/palace and you're looking for some kind of adventure (Think "Mark of Kri" here). So, you go to the local academy and sign up for "Legendary Swordsman 101". You pay a month's worth of dock-hand wages, and are treated to a montage of training clips, reflecting your character's performance and progress (Think "Princess Maker" here). If the course is too advanced, it'll just be your idiot hero dropping things and slipping on banana peels, and if it's too easy, he'll figure it out in a week and either leave early (giving control back to you) or sleep through his classes (wasting time). If it's just right, though, he'll learn a lot and come back better than before.

So you've got some sword skills, and you can either go back for some grad school or sign up for a tour with the army. You don't need sword credentials for it, but since you've got a diploma, you have more options. You can sign up for a tour with the infantry, which is easy and undistinguished, but will get you veteran's status. Or you can try out for the cavalry, hoping that your superb bladework will get you in for more money, more opportunity for advancement, a nicer uniform and a real shot at glory in a smaller, more distinguished unit. Once that's done, another montage shows your feats and failures (possibly your death) and you get a chance to re-enlist or retire. Up to you.

Say you're getting a little old for all the running and chopping, and the shrapnel in your knee makes riding difficult, so you retire, and decide to take your pension and open a dry goods store. You make some money, get hitched, and produce a kid. Time passes, the store prospers, and you become mayor of the town. Meanwhile, you're sending the kid to school, a privelege you never enjoyed, and inventing a new kind of axle that greases itself. Unfortunately, you suffer a horseriding accident while testing the device, and are trampled to death. The end.

The score screen then pops up, showing achievements, rank, life span, and gloriousness of death.

This way, if you want to be a hobo and live day-to-day, never doing anything, you could watch the sun rise and set thousands of times. But opportunities for little segues would abound. If you ride to Persia to trade silks, it takes you eight months to get there and another eight to get back, provided that you aren't jumped by bandits on the way. A shipwreck or jail term could cost you years before you had a chance to get back to work. A college degree, military service, and voyages on ships would all eat time, as well, meaning that a long life of adventure would take relatively little time, but a short life of day-to-day thievery would drag along, unless you got caught.

IMO, it would be neat to continue playing, as your son/daughter, and be able to build on the legacy the last character left you. If you have a good military career, your kid will be able to become an officer pretty much by default. If your surviving friends are influential, your son might get to marry one of their daughters, helping with social status. If you make a boatload of money, your daughter will have a wider array of suitors, and won't have to work for a living, meaning she can study more, and be a more effective mother, meaning that the next generation will have a bit of a head start.

This can go a lot of different ways. It's up to you. If I was making the game, I'd set a two-hundred year limit, or something like that, and have something huge happen at the end, like an alien invasion, or a world cataclysm. You have two hundred years (with progressive technology, etc.) to prepare your family and the world to handle it. If you do well, people fight back the aliens, or terraform another planet, or cure the disease, or learn to recycle, or whatever, and your last generation has something to do with it.

A Mausoleum would be a good scorecard for this sort of thing, with varying level of opulence for the various ancestors of your current character.

I agree. Fable had a farily half-baked aging system, which was vague enough for me to wonder why my hair had changed color when I levelled up. Ageing was purely cosmetic in that game, having no impact on gameplay. You couldn't die of old age, you didn't become enfeebled, or wiser, or more revered in the community. That's just annoying.

If it won't improve the game, then cull it.

Just an idea: Start the game young(maybe 5?) and with slightly varying stats, then have them choose a mentor or trainer, and each trainer will give them a greater strength in a different skill. This will take many years, then let the player free at about age 20. And the rest goes on as you had said earlier.

Another idea: what if more trainers are chooseable depending on how well the last character had done?