I find it funny there's always a fight between our animal instincts and our appreciated intelligence in everyday's life. You can feel it when you see a beautiful woman, a delicious cake or when you see a spider (whatever you fear of). Instincts take control of our minds everywhere. I've been thinking of a game in which you can show the progress of this fight along human evolution. Here's the story in brief: At the end of the day, you fall asleep, but when you wake up, nothing is the same. You are in a prehistoric environment, with rare animals walking and flying everywhere, and you've turned into an ancestral hominid. Your instincs have taken control of your mind, but with a feeling inside that pushes you to manage your supervivence: your primitive intelligency. As you progress in the story, you make great discoveries that make you [re]evolve through hominid species until homo sapiens. You learn how to make and use tools, weapons, fire and finally language. The main objective are play through scenarios to finally discover what makes you evolve in a situation that needs an intelligent use of your abilities at the moment. For example: in the phase where you are an Australopithecus, you r abilities are throwing stones, hit and bite others and grumbling, so don't expect to kill a mammoth it that state. How to show the fun of the instinct vs. intelligency fight? I can think of situations that make it visible, so you are the intelligent part of the fight and the computer plays the instincts for you. What do you think about the instinct vs. intelligency part? It would be like a bonus, if you resolve a situation where your instincts get you in, you gain more control over your character and abilities, being less prone to your instinct's dirty tricks. Thanks for your feedback. PS: English is not my first language, there will be lots of faults, don't be bad at it ;)

How do you controll your character? I guess it won't be a fighting game between the intelligence and the instincts...

Hmmm, sorry about that, I forgot to specify the type of game.
It's intended to be an action/adventure game, with a few chapters representing each big step of human evolution (australopithecus, homo erectus, homo habilis, homo sapiens).

And how will the instincts effect the gameplay? will they take the controlls from the player when they are launched?

Yes, there will be like cut-scenes where do you see how your character makes actions that put him in trouble, then you get the controls and try to solve the situation.

I'll try to illustrate with an example situation:

You see a honeycomb hung from a tree and think, 'Hmmm I like honey'. Suddently, your character starts to run towards the tree (and bees) to get the honey. When the angry bees sting you, you regain control of your character.

Now is when you have to solve the situation. You can jump to the river, use a branch to make the honeycomb fall from the tree, use smoke from a fire to drive bees away or simply run and continue with the story.

Those situations may be triggered when you are near the situation scenario (at 20 meters from the tree i.e.) or you could be forced to play it (you should be able to leave out the situation like escaping from bee stings).

If you solve it, you will be more proficient throwing stones, making fire, using a club or even running :D but you'll also see less of this situations.

Something like dr. Jeckil and mr. Hide.

Thinking about it, if your instincts are strong enough to take over when you see food - the honeycomb - they should be strong enough to take over when you face an immidiate danger - the bees - and when you feel pain - the stings.

Yes, I know. But it's intended to be a playable game and not a movie.

I want the game to be somewhat humorous in that situations, so you have to correct what your instincts do bad.

How do you think it will affect gameplay? See that you would be somewhat forced to suffer the situation, even if later you'll continue without solving it.

EDIT: A friend just told me that in Vampire: The Masquerade, you enter in a frenzy and attack your mates or other people without control (it seems that controlling your character in this situation is somewhat hard). This may be an example of what I intend to make.


PD: I think I'm explaining the concept good, let me know if it's not. I feel like it isn't being understood or well exposed.