I guess the question is whether the game would be focused on a single character at a time or on the dynasty as a whole. If you control one character directly then social interactions and other direct types of gameplay elements become more important. If you focus on the dynasty it becomes more of a strategy/sim type game.
I could see a game where you control your character directly. You spend the days in your manor planning, negotiating, judging, and ordering people around. At night you go out on the town and spread your influence in informal settings like restaurants, plays, or bars. Sometimes there's a special occasion that gives rise to unique opportunities for subterfuge or subtlety. I picture an RPG style game using a skill- and knowledge-based experience system.
Taking it in the other direction puts you in control of the entire household. You still have the head of the dynasty but you can give orders to any unit directly. I picture something like the sims where you're concerned with relationships between people (as Drethon mentioned.) Either way, I still really like sunandshadow's selective breeding idea. I've had an idea for a breeding game rolling around in my head for a while now...
Game time length with generations and seasons?
Quote:Original post by Spencer Bowers
I could see a game where you control your character directly. You spend the days in your manor planning, negotiating, judging, and ordering people around. At night you go out on the town and spread your influence in informal settings like restaurants, plays, or bars. Sometimes there's a special occasion that gives rise to unique opportunities for subterfuge or subtlety. I picture an RPG style game using a skill- and knowledge-based experience system.
Interesting, I was picturing a cross between civilization and a dating sim (the kind where you can't make your character walk places) until you said that last sentence.
Quote:Taking it in the other direction puts you in control of the entire household. You still have the head of the dynasty but you can give orders to any unit directly. I picture something like the sims where you're concerned with relationships between people (as Drethon mentioned.) Either way, I still really like sunandshadow's selective breeding idea. I've had an idea for a breeding game rolling around in my head for a while now...
I'm actually running a diceless online selective breeding game over at Gaia Online right now, lol. The players have evolved up to quadrapeds and figured out how about 2/3 of the chromosomes work (in a single week, lol, I'm almost running out of new content to give them). I was expecting they would be competitive and keep secrets, which would have made it much slower, but they chose to share info and cooperate instead. Also discovered that naming files in a logical way is a security hole, making it easy to guess other files' names.
A while ago I had a crazy game idea tangentially related to this - you selectively breed 'creatures' (although incompatible ones fight instead) but instead of being animals these 'creatures' represent memes, so your herd of them is sort of like your personal philosophy, which strongly affect how you socialize in the rest of the game. The main game was a combination of building up a tech tree from sticks and stones, adventure game puzzles, and dating sim.
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Quote:Original post by Spencer Bowers
I could see a game where you control your character directly. You spend the days in your manor planning, negotiating, judging, and ordering people around. At night you go out on the town and spread your influence in informal settings like restaurants, plays, or bars. Sometimes there's a special occasion that gives rise to unique opportunities for subterfuge or subtlety. I picture an RPG style game using a skill- and knowledge-based experience system.
This is my basic idea of the game play except without the day/night separation. My extremely long term goal (may be overly complex and I can cut it short if it proves unimplementable) is to allow the player to perform any aspect of life when ever they want to. Go out and help farm, mine, act as a mercenary or work completely indirectly with social activities with the NPCs responding to your requests based on standings vs the activities they consider important (ex, basic survival).
Initially the player starts on their own and will spend most time surviving and teaching the next generation(s) advanced survival skills.
In the middle game the player has gained enough relationships with general NPCs or additional family members through generations that the player can assign friendly NPCs to survival tasks while the player focuses on performing advanced tasks (research, army leading, espionage, etc...) and teaching the next generation(s) these advanced skills.
In the end game the player has reached the point of a feudal lord type position where they are likely spending most time directing leaders of different types of tasks in how to operate in general but can still go talk to the foot soldiers or perform any level of operations should they feel like it. Actually working with the lower level workers would improve relationships with them and allow for increased efficiencies.
I suppose the real answer is I will need to build the basic game and begin playing it and have others test the game out to determine how much value there is in the different parts of game play to determine the balances of time.
Ok, now I'm getting a clearer idea of where you're trying to go with this. At first you're just a no-name peasant under some noble. You start learning some kind of trade, and eventually pass it on to your child. Eventually one of your descendants is good enough that maybe they're put in charge of that operation by the noble. Alternately, maybe you buy your freedom and set up shop on your own. Then you can start hiring your own helpers (friends you've made while working for the noble?) You grow in power and influence and the game shifts from direct labor over to influence. You're granted a noble title and you win the game when you become king.
That could be a trade off. Your people would respect you a lot more for working in the trenches but the rest of the nobility would likely lose respect.
Quote:In the end game the player has reached the point of a feudal lord type position where they are likely spending most time directing leaders of different types of tasks in how to operate in general but can still go talk to the foot soldiers or perform any level of operations should they feel like it. Actually working with the lower level workers would improve relationships with them and allow for increased efficiencies.
That could be a trade off. Your people would respect you a lot more for working in the trenches but the rest of the nobility would likely lose respect.
Other options of course are to provide a constant slow time scale, but allow the player to 'fast-forward'. Like in The Elder Scrolls (and whatever other games), where you rest for up to 24 hours and the time advances that far in the game. This has the advantage of allowing the player to decide when they want to advance. Perhaps the time advanced could be capped at the resources the player has available - if you only have enough food stored to last 4 months, you can only advance by 4 months.
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Quote:Original post by Luhz
Other options of course are to provide a constant slow time scale, but allow the player to 'fast-forward'. Like in The Elder Scrolls (and whatever other games), where you rest for up to 24 hours and the time advances that far in the game. This has the advantage of allowing the player to decide when they want to advance. Perhaps the time advanced could be capped at the resources the player has available - if you only have enough food stored to last 4 months, you can only advance by 4 months.
My current thoughts are to prevent player based control of time so that resource management has to revolve around the time progression but your idea of basing manual time progress based on resources is an interesting alternative. I'll have to consider this, thanks!
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