ugh! the slot machine wishes to fulfill! i remember those! usually nothing i was interested in. thank god they were optional - although it could leave you with a rather unfulfilled sim. but then some of the rewards were pretty hokey too - like being able to toggle summer and winter textures. i just chalked all that up to the fact that EA was calling the shots by then, and they were grasping at straws to add additional game play.

You may actually rethink this :) The wish system may guide new players to do "good" things. Especially when you don't have a clear winning condition in your game.

Something like you get the "gather more wood" if your tribe runs out of firewood, or paint high quality animal when one of your tribe members is getting better in painting.

The player can just ignore those if he/she have some different goal in mind but otherwise provide "things to do", either for short- or mid-term goals.

As for rewards it may be something purely cosmetic like new painting designs for cave walls. Something that player may wish to pursue, but won't be forced to do so.

Players assigning themselves to gather 50 potion ingredients would also be included in this type of system, with no action required on the player's part to define the quest; the system can simply be set to reward the player every time they gather #50 of any gatherable resource (and also #10 and #100, etc.)

so you're talking about automatically tracking things....

hmm...

but that's sort of just like awarding exp automatically, except you reward with mood boost.

there's nothing relating to "this goal is special to me, the player" or "this goal would be important to my character".

also, you automatically get mood boosts on successful completion of most actions anyway. so the automatic rewards are already sort of in there, but on a per action basis. IE you get a mood boost for each arrow made, but not at every 10 made (or whatever).

I definitely think automatically tracking everything is good, because the idea is to create the feeling that the game world is alive enough to notice what the player is up to, and cares about the player enough to reward them. Kind of like a fair, friendly Gaia (or whatever the world-spirit of a different world would be called). One of the major demotivational factors of single-player games in general is how often they fail to react to the player's actions in any kind of intelligent or social way. Regular pacing of mood boosts is also generally a good thing for RPGs and a hard to design and thus even more valuable accomplishment for sims. Mood boosts every 10 arrows is better than every arrow because humans think in 'chunking' and the player has a chance to anticipate the reward while they are in the process of earning it. Anticipation which is then positively satisfied is one of the major underlying reasons people read and watch movies, not to mention playing games.

As far as a system where a player has to actively define each quest, it's not bad, but I think that it has the potential to be immersion-breaking if you don't get artsy with the UI and explain the system within the context of caveman life. I also think that some players will just avoid it because it seems like work rather than gameplay, while other players will get frustrated every time they do something and then discover afterward that they could have made it a quest and gotten more rewards for the same action. To combat both of these the logical solution is to include as complete of an array of pre-made quests as you can think of, so the player can just select them instead of needing to create them, and can look through them to learn what actions they can quest-ify. And if you do that you're 3/4 of the way to the 'achievement quest system' I'm proposing anyway. (No reason you can't combine the two systems if you want though. Like give players a choice about what their reward for each achievement is, or even give them achievement tokens to spend at a token shop.

Perhaps a Player Challenge (created to be issued openly to other players) ?? ...

what you describe ought to be pretty well covered by the built-in quest editor that will let users create user defined quests they can share online and download and plugin and play. it shouldn't bee too hard, as pretty much all possible quests consist of a series of stages of only half a dozen or so general quest type actions such as goto location, defeat target, etc.

You may actually rethink this The wish system may guide new players to do "good" things. Especially when you don't have a clear winning condition in your game.
Something like you get the "gather more wood" if your tribe runs out of firewood, or paint high quality animal when one of your tribe members is getting better in painting.

The player can just ignore those if he/she have some different goal in mind but otherwise provide "things to do", either for short- or mid-term goals.

"player challenges" of some sort. interesting. reminds me of missions in the newer total war titles (shogun2, rome2). recruit a spy, raise a fleet, defeat an army, capture a settlement, research a tech, etc. its will often issue these when you don't have "whatever" (spies, fleets, etc).

As for rewards it may be something purely cosmetic like new painting designs for cave walls. Something that player may wish to pursue, but won't be forced to do so.

purely cosmetic would be better than total war, there the reward is usually only what you'd get if you simply did the action of your own volition. IE the reward for recruiting a spy is - a spy unit! ooh, and ahh! <g>.

challenges might be interesting. but they'd have to make sense, and not have hokey rewards. i think that one will go on the todo list for further thought.

To combat both of these the logical solution is to include as complete of an array of pre-made quests as you can think of, so the player can just select them instead of needing to create them, and can look through them to learn what actions they can quest-ify. And if you do that you're 3/4 of the way to the 'achievement quest system' I'm proposing anyway.

so you start by making user quests "one click" simple to trigger. would two clicks be acceptable, action and object? then the next step is to simply automatically track them all at all times, and give rewards as they are completed - similar to an achievements system which constantly checks conditions. that's the idea you're talking about?

that would automatically reward the player for any type of gameplay they prefer, assuming you had a predefined quest that covered whatever they were doing. but it doesn't expressly create a link between "i need X, so Y is my goal. so i do Z" its more like "look, the player has done a lot of Z, reward them!". i mean, i gather a lot of nuts and herbs for food, healing, and sacrifices, but arrows are what i need. and again, those rewards are in there, but on a per action basis, not in chunks. and sometimes the anticipation can be great even for a single action. while there's not much anticipation while waiting to see if you succeed in making a single wood arrow, its a very different story for something like a storage pit or hut, which is a major undertaking.

i see what you mean about there being little difference between user quests and automatic rewards, mostly ease of use issues.

perhaps approach it with a different trigger question:

if the player can do anything they want and will be appropriately rewarded no matter what they choose, how to reflect that one action is more important to the player than another, and therefore provide a greater reward for such actions?

one way is to make all rewards higher. that way a player gets X rewards for doing some subset of the possible activities (the ones they like), as opposed to X rewards for doing all activities about the same amount. but that doesn't actually change things, it just scales them.

so maybe the existing system which rewards all activities appropriately is enough? if the player needs arrows, they'll make arrows, and get mood boost and woodworking exp as a reward, but nothing special for having 20 arrows for each archer band member, other than the fact that their archers now have arrows, so lookout world! <g>. FYI it takes about a dozen wood arrows to take down a single camelops (american camel).

Perhaps a Player Challenge (created to be issued openly to other players) ?? ...

what you describe ought to be pretty well covered by the built-in quest editor that will let users create user defined quests they can share online and download and plugin and play. it shouldn't bee too hard, as pretty much all possible quests consist of a series of stages of only half a dozen or so general quest type actions such as goto location, defeat target, etc.

These things are also already pretty much covered by people who create games ...

BUT you want them IN the game, right ?

Because at some point missions need to be made, and rewards assigned, and a player assigning rewards to him/herself doesn't work(i found a sunflower, + 10 million credits)

instead of going through the hassle of linking rewards and missions, let the player do that for EACHOTHER.

The mission-maker would need some kind of "interest" he wants taken care of, maybe he is the owner of a forest that has too many wolves and he creates:

"Kill 1 wolf; mood goes up" where each player can only get one mood-boost daily

"kill 5 wolves, gain one thousand credits" where the mission-creator would pay the credits and know he would make these back by selling mushrooms that grow in the forest.

Balance-wise you would only need to make sure the "market-forces" can do their things unhindered and this part of the game would balance itself out.

perhaps approach it with a different trigger question:

if the player can do anything they want and will be appropriately rewarded no matter what they choose, how to reflect that one action is more important to the player than another, and therefore provide a greater reward for such actions?

one way is to make all rewards higher. that way a player gets X rewards for doing some subset of the possible activities (the ones they like), as opposed to X rewards for doing all activities about the same amount. but that doesn't actually change things, it just scales them.

so maybe the existing system which rewards all activities appropriately is enough? if the player needs arrows, they'll make arrows, and get mood boost and woodworking exp as a reward, but nothing special for having 20 arrows for each archer band member, other than the fact that their archers now have arrows, so lookout world! <g>. FYI it takes about a dozen wood arrows to take down a single camelops (american camel).

Unless you have unique rewards for certain long term tasks (like unlocking new tech tree branches or finding pieces of story or something), then yes I think that "appropriately rewarded" (plus the survival of your tribespeople) would already take care of things and you don't need rewards for more important things. Generally the logarithmic nature of rewards (reward for the first 1, then the 10th, etc.) takes care of encouraging the player to try new things in a tutorial-like way. You just have to make sure the system is verbose enough so the player can tell what they can do and how to do it.

Talking about difficult missions, the reward can just be a badge showing what they have completed.

That way players can show off their skills and they could check each other out, knowing what the other is worth.

(this is assuming there will be some player-skill involved)

Talking about difficult missions, the reward can just be a badge showing what they have completed.

That way players can show off their skills and they could check each other out, knowing what the other is worth.

(this is assuming there will be some player-skill involved)

The art of being a 'caveman' (or cavewoman) is being versatile to handle what comes your way (the big deal about the later agriculture/animal husbandry was the predictablity it added - knowing/discovering territory and its resources is another method)

So Groups of tasks in different skill areas (with basic skills across the board coverage a typical taught by parents : ie- just about everyone knows how to make a rock flake tool, but some better ones are more useful/efficient) Expertise becomes more essoteric so broader skills are a survival strategy.

These things are also already pretty much covered by people who create games ...

i'll make the quest gens and the quest editor, and some hard coded quests with the editor.

BUT you want them IN the game, right ?

what i want is for the player - above and beyond whatever quests they get via the questgens and editor quests - to somehow be able to say that "I want to set a personal goal of making 5 wood javelins", or whatever happens to be important to their character at the moment. a recent one from play testing today: "get 3 bone to make a bone needle" - which requires hunting animals.

Because at some point missions need to be made, and rewards assigned, and a player assigning rewards to him/herself doesn't work(i found a sunflower, + 10 million credits)

the game could be programmed to handle common activities - possession of an item of example - with relative ease. but unusual goals would require open end user defined "goals and rewards", or would have to be unsupported. its possible that a few basic goals like "possess item" might cover most of the non-quest goals a player might want to pursue.

but as you say, any open ended system would have to be "on your honor" to avoid cheating / "monty haul" gameplay.

perhaps a few generic goals that cover most cases, with a small mood boost as the reward, no "custom goals and rewards", and you can only have one goal at a time. something like that. and perhaps a minimum for goals, so it can't be trivial. like "gather 1 wood". the reward should be enough incentive so they'd set a goal when they had an appropriate candidate. but you don't want them setting goals for every little action - "oh, i'm thirsty! new user quest! drink! - sweet! 5 mood points!" <g>.