OK GUYS I have a unique game idea help me flesh it out please!

Title: THE RISE OF MANGenre: Real Time TacticsPlatform: PC (duh)The plot: It is the land before time. Set approximately 100,000 years ago, THE RISE OF MAN (caps necesary dammit) is a top-down, real-time tactics game where the player assumes the role of one Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Its name, sex, size, and traits are up to you, the player. It is your job to survive. You must hunt, fish, eat, sleep, and most importantly think in order to stay alive.Early gameplay is composed of a Diablo-esque focus on your one human, collecting food, making weapons, staying alive. All from top-down third person point-and-click.Here's the real selling point of the game: The world you inhabit is one utterly massive, consistent plane, a fully rendered depiction of Ancient Europa, from the Iberian peninsula (Spain) to the Caucasus mountains by the Black Sea. All across this immense game world are randomly scattered herds of animals, groups of humans, and the kicker: tribes of Neanderthals.Eventually it is up to you to conquer and become leader of a group of humans, and to live out your life according to your own doctrines. But first, to become a cheiftain, you can either come into a group and duel the current leader, or attempt to display your thinking prowess by showing off the tools you have. Or you could simply attempt to join the group and work your way up the heirarchy, and wait for a peaceful sucession of power. It's up to you. As you become a leader, the gameplay evolves into an RTS on the scale of Company of Heroes (rarely more than 30 people under your command, minus tanks).With your tribe you will hunt large creatures such as mammoths in complex plans laid out by yourself, but by far the most rigorous of your challenges will be the war with Neanderthals. These burly people are both tougher and stronger than you and your men, and it will be a real tactical feat to oust these primitive warrior people in combat.In this consistent world you can choose to live a nomadic life on the move, or eventually settle in a cave/construct primitive structures to live from. You save the game when you sleep. Game days are approximately 30 minutes long, and your game lasts until your character ages to the ripe old age of 25 when he will die from old age. Or you could die before then. In this consitent world you have only one life. Protect it at all costs. If your character dies, all of his save games are deleted.All the while you were playing, the game was secretly tallying up everything you do, and in the end you will get a score for your performance based on damage taken over the years, damage dealt, technology aquired, and other stuff like that. Your score is posted on the global leaderboard.Well? Do you like my idea? It's the product of one extremely boring math class's worth of day-dreaming. Feel free to approve, dissaprove, make suggestions and the like.OK GUYS I have a unique game idea help me flesh it out please!
''The world you inhabit is one utterly massive, consistent plane, a fully rendered depiction of Ancient Europa, from the Iberian peninsula (Spain) to the Caucasus mountains by the Black Sea. All across this immense game world are randomly scattered herds of animals, groups of humans, and the kicker: tribes of Neanderthals.'' good luck getting enough 3d models and enough level designers to do this without being boring and repetitive. fact is, the larger the world is the more man power you need, and the harder it is to make the game fun simply because you need exponentially more contenteidt: but i do like the concept OK GUYS I have a unique game idea help me flesh it out please!
Good point Teldath, I guess I just sorta wanted a map big enough to give the player a feeling of both exploration and a sense of weight in deciding to make a long journey. maybe something more like 500x500 square miles, big enough for all that stuff, but small enough to still be managable.
I like the idea of the game in general but i'm not sure about losing all save games when dead. Although it does add realism, I think it might put quite a few people off. Maybe that could just be an option or only on the harder difficulties. But great idea in general.
Yeah I know what you mean Darkhorse, good call on making that a setting for difficulties. I love it when games do more than just tweak stats for raising difficulty.Does anyone have any ideas for multiplayer?
I think your idea is missing some pretty crucial elements.For starters, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of motivation, either in the micro or macro scale. Why should the player have to do these things? Whats the point? Whats the goal? Company of Heroes's goals for its singleplayer is to prepare you for multiplayer, tell a story, and reward you with new units. Diablo's goal come from frequent loot drops, the customization and power of your character with each new level, and to tell a story. The only motivation you've given for doing all of these things is the reward of exploration - which is a very, very weak motivator.You speak in terms too vague and qualitative like ''it will be very hard to take these guys down'' and ''complex plans needed to acheive this.'' Well.... Ok... how? What kind of planning is required? Is it just good use of cover and hard counters like Company of Heroes? Or do you need to make detailed plans like the older Rainbow Six's that needed a good 10 or 20 minutes of looking at floorplans and designing pathways? Most importantly, whats makes this planning aspect fun?As for the aging, im not sure you've really thought it through. 25 years of 365 days at 30 minutes each day, works out to around 190 days of real life time. If the intent it to live for that long, i think its pretty ridiculous that death via actions would erase your guy after putting in thousands of hours.The whole die = lose saved data is a poor idea unless the entire game can be completed in around an hour. Think about Oblivion having that system, as compared to, say, Left4dead.Overall, the game soundslike a lot of work, for very little reward, based on everything you've written. It wouldn't make for a very fun game.
EDIT: Maybe that sounded too harsh.....So Xaosll how would you make a game in this setting fun? Gimme ur ideas plz
[QUOTE=''Uncle_Uzi''] Well Xaosll, I would NEVER want you on a team that conceptualizes things. Why? Becuse you're arguing very specific mechanics when we're simply discussing broad ideas. Did you want me to plan everything out, right here, giving numerical damage values for Spear X or Arrow Y? Why would I do that?I don't know about you but I don't think that kind of stuff belongs on a conceptual level discussion.What's fundamentally wrong with it? Do you lack the capability of inferring what taking down a mammoth in a RTS would be like? Do I have to paint out every ****ing picture for you? Is it that hard to imagine fighting strong but stupid neanderthals? Honestly it sounds like you're the kind of person who has no imagination whatsoever.I'm open to criticism but damn, you are just making a fool of yourself. Your only legitimate complaint is with that of the incentives of gameplay, but I think it would end up like a Total War game in the sense that you're not playing the Grand Campaign to win, but rather to enjoy the whole experience of it. Ideally the act of role playing an ancient man would be enjoyable enough to warrant replay. But to you, that's not enough. Have fun with your finite single player experiences. I will be playing the games that have multiple climaxes, whose events are determined by ME the player.[/QUOTE]Xaosll isn't making a fool of himself, he's just a bit brash and honesty is a what you're after here. He is right in one area though, and that's the motivators. Every game on the planet provides a reason for the player to play it - Dawn of War 2: For the lore, gore, loot and fun. Splinter Cell: For the thrills, story and style. If you can find some way of incorporating a great system into your game, such as a rudimentary crafting system where you can build something suitable for the time era: like discovering fire to then lead onto cooking, will lead to exponential growth in the rewards and progression. You are tackling an era which hasn't really been explored so kudos for originality! If you can use modern day concepts such as crafting, edge of your seat combat and a unique artstyle you could do well. But think about this just briefly: BECAUSE the era you are tackling is relatively fresh, gamers will be quite cautious of entering the game. Provide them some fun and achievement, reward them in a sense to make them comfortable...and BAM you hit them with what the crux of the game is about: survivability in a barren and dangerous world (much like Stalker, which pulled it off beautifully).
Im not asking for specific numbners. But you are lacking some pretty basic features found in any game worth playing - like a goal. You're not actually mentioning anything about what makes the game fun, when you break it down to its basic element.I dont care about the setting. I dont care about specific mechanics of arrows and spears and tribes and what they are or what they are called. They can be replaced by other objects and different time settings, but not the core mechanics of what actually makes the game fun. You're basically leaving the person reading it to fill in the gaps of their perception of what should be done. Thats not a game idea. Thats an idea that every person fills in the rest of it to make what they think is a game out of that.Do you want to paint a picture for me? I'd like that actually. It solidifies your idea. Is it that hard to imagine fighting strong neanderthals? Are we talking fighting them like in Company or Heroes heavily using cover, or Warcraft 3 focusing mostly on abilities, or Freedom Fighters wher the commander has only indirect control of his units via orders, or Age of Empires relying on hard counters? So, yes its actually pretty hard to imagine what you're thinking.As for the ''Grand Campaign'' spect of the game, doing it for the sake of doing it, isn't a very compelling reason. Its exactly why the grand campaign in M2:TW actually has a winning point, usually a far off province. Continous fighting rewards you with stronger Generals, more land, and new units. Since each faction tend to have pretty different units and are located in different landscapes, each faction you fight feels a little different, so you get a new experience in fighting enemies and new scenery. Replaying as a different faction really requires a change of strategy.In a handful of sentences i've just said about half the entire pitch of M2:TW if i were trying to get someone who is interested in buying it. The other half would be talking about the style of thegame and the RTS/TBS part. That too would only be a few sentences.If you were trying to sell the game to someone what would you tell them of your game? What are the important points? What would really, really want to make them play it over another game? Is it really just the setting as the most unique point? What would grab their intial interest? What would hold them for the long run?