Nice Games Jam: "Dinosaurs of North Dakota"

The clubhouse gets Cretaceous this week; your nice hosts have been challenged to create a game about dinosaurs and their feeding habits.

Prompt

Make a game about the feeding habits of dinosaurs or of paleontologists, bonus points if all the dinosaurs are from the same era.

Game type

Design document

Player count

1

Rules

• Cretaceous period
  • Flowering plants evolved here
  • Early mammals here too
  • Velociraptors too!
• Different sized dinosaurs
• Name: Dinosaurs of North Dakota
  • Play as big (T-rex), small (dog-sized) and medium (triceratops)
  • Survive a day as each of these creatures
  • Order of play
    • Medium first (herbivore)
    • Big next (T-rex)
    • Small last (scavenger)
    • Then Paleontologist discovers (eats chicken with a PLASTIC fork)
  • Where you die determines how preserved the bones are during the paleontology phase
    • If you want more preserved bones you have to choose to not live as long (due to how the preservation works)
  • Gameplay
    • Play as the different creatures, the player chooses when that phase of the game ends
      • Can also end after a certain time played
    • Then you swap to a new creature and play as them, choosing when to end
    • When you get back to a creature, time has passed and things are different in the world (partly due to player influence from other creatures)
      • Player knocking down trees might be knocked down in future scenes, eating a lot of plants may make the area sparse in the future
    • Keep playing as the different creature until enough time has passed
    • Afterwards, play as a paleontologist and rediscover what you’ve done
    • Record what you’ve done with the knowledge the paleontologist has (and not the player), so it won’t actually be accurate to the player’s playthrough
    • Based on what the player’s done, it can affect what things the paleontologist will be able to say about the state of things after