Game ideas: Historic role playing/adventure game

From GDWiki

Idea: the player controls a family through the different periods of History in some part of the world (different themes like Europe, Middle East, America, Earth). The player must exploit his knowledge of real historical events to take his character/family at the best places.

For instance, let's take as theme: Location: Europe + North of Africe + Middle East Period: from 500BC to 1850AD

The player controls a family specified by its family members. At any given time, the player control the main member of the family but if this member dies (too old, war, epidemia), the player can take control of another member of its family. The player can also have a light control on other family members.

The control on a member would consist in:

• choosing an activity (sailor, merchant, priest, doctor, warrior, politics, artist, scientist, ...)
• choosing where to go/be at any time (flee the plague, go for a business opportunity, enter the court of a king, ...)
• take decisions wrt to events (change religion, fight in a revolution, take part in a war...)

The evolution of the world (e.g. Europe) will follow main historical events that cannot be changed. There would be a simulation engine that would take care of different "sections" of the world:

• demography (inhabitants, ...)
• economy (trade, industrial production, general activity, conjecture,...)
• spirituality (religion, influence on power)
• political (organisation of countries, power)
• military (armies, war, ...)
• arts (painting, architecture, music)
• science (physics, biology,...)

Each historical event would have different impacts on those sections, some examples:

• Gutenberg: impact on science, economy, spirituality
• plague: demography, economy
• French revolution: political, spirituality
• Barbarian invasion: demography, military
• Great Schism: spirituality, political
• Crusade: spirituality, political, military

The simulation engine will simulate every historical event with its impact on the world and will "interpolate" history in between dates. Moreover, it will give to the player the representation of his world via historical maps (like in [1]) for the different sections. The player would see only what he knows (kind of "fog of war" with unknown parts in grey) but by travelling or sending letters he could expand his knowledge.

The gameplay will have the following component:

• choose where to go at any time (be at the right place at the right time)
• change properties of family member (change religion from catholic to protestant, change activity from businessman to politic, invest in some projects like discovery of America)
• take decisions based on events ("You heard that there are turmoils in Paris in 1788, would you like to line up with a) revolutionnaries b) clergy c) aristocracy?")

The goal of the game would be to earn "points" by:

• taking advantage of events (if a war is going on and the player is a weapon merchant, he can earn money or points as business is good)
• being at important events (the player could see all his genealogy tree with his presence at "big events" like "I was at the crowning of king XXX" or "I was doctor during the big plague" etc)

The gameplay would give advantage of people knowing the history (political, military, artistic) and hence the game could be also quite educative.

A multiplayer version could be also nice but I don't see clerly how to synchronise the story of each player ...

About the content, the game would allow people to write down their own events and so enhance the game (an expert in "History of France" could add a lot of details in the description of some given event/period in France and define precisely its impact on the different "sections" of the game). While it would be possible to invent events from scratch, I think it would diminish a lot the interest of the game.

The feeling (GUI) of the game would be more like Spice Trade