“I would suggest that the player doesn’t start as a human, but rather low down in the chain, such as a flower or a fly.”

The problem is, starting as a flower would suck too. What happens if you were to get bad Karma? Can you still go lower?

I’m still working on the whole chain thing. I don’t want to make the game too unbalanced, which it automatically gets if you start too high up or too low down.

There is also the discussion on what is considered high up the ladder and what is considered low. In Hinduism you might reincarnate as an inanimate object which would suck for a game. Hinduism also has human as the highest form, if you were to play through human without getting bad Karma it is an automatic win for you.

Orphism, however, has humans dying and coming back until they have pleased the Gods enough. This is probably the route I would introduce for the game since I don’t like the “human = winning”-idea.

Thinking Cap is going to stay on for a while (hope I have enough lemons) but you can at least consider me another player in this little competition ;-)

“What if the mistake which you've made ages before, when you were young, foolish, and inexperienced with the game, ends up slowing down all of your progress and frustrating you when you've become more comfortable”

That’s almost impossible with this game. You know you are going to die and get back as something else. As in my example, you are going to get back to one of your earlier life forms at some point. So in the future you will always have the ability to fix previous mistakes.

This is also why I’m not very comfortable with Kroc’s Spore comparison. In Spore there is a linear evolution: you always go from the lowest/simplest form to a more advanced form. In Opwika this wouldn’t be the case. Losing Karma will actively make you fall down to a less superior state.

Exactly, which is why the human gets to choose whether to set the town ablaze or not the second time around. Will work on a revision to make that more clear.

“Is it more of a point-and-click sandbox game, or is it more action-based, with movements and a few choice actions mapped to buttons but few menus?”

I visualise it mostly as a first-player sandbox. I don’t want to limit people from moving anywhere they want. (This probably means the map should be an island to limit people just enough.) At the same time the game will consist mostly of making choices. I think the only way of building a perpetual game like this is to have binary choices.

The best way to go is probably to hang choices to certain objects and actions. You see a knive? A: take it, or B: leave it. You have the knive and see your neighbour? A: attack, B: leave.

When you are a flower your choices would mostly reflect around yourself, to let the player get a better understanding of how a flower cannot interact with objects around it. Grow up or grow sideways? Yellow or Blue? Eat insects or use insects?

“It would actually be interesting to have different lifeforms control differently, to reflect just how different the flower’s perspective is versus a human’s. Of course, they would have to be similar enough to not confuse players”

All lifeforms will be given rudimentary vision. Since every life starts at (almost) the same physical location the player will quickly identify with the world and would get less confused. Of course to a compound eyed insect this world will be broken up in many different views and to an eyeless plant it will consist of heat maps (and possibly scent maps to help with scent based actions, think The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). Perspective and size changes too.

Thanks everyone for the input! I am working on a revision to cover all the things you guys have brought up and hope to get it online before tomorrow’s deadline.

“How would you handle different time scales?”

That is one of the few things I haven’t been able to tackle yet. As simpler lifeforms actually need multiple generations to accomplish anything while the more complex lifeforms will only need one.

Maybe you’ll play through several generations of plants, that way you will be able to spread your pollen around and grow in total population each year to come. So while a human might play through 20 years of a life a plant will get 20 generations of the species.

Compression is an option too but it would feel weird. If you play a fly you will only have a fraction of even a plant’s life. If whatever you do as a fly still needs to span the full 20 years of the human, the fly would have the world around it move at a fast-forward speed.

Another option I have considered is repeating and stacking. The flower life would actually repeat 20 times within the human life. The effects of the previous flower lives will stay in effect so if you send out pollen to grow more flowers it will effectively spread the plant while also keeping the plants left by the previous replay.