My last post was accidentally deleted by staff so this will be a modified repost.

Kiasyn gave me an idea for a MUD based on Evolution (The Game). The basics of what I have in mind are as follows.

1) You will start the game a basic creature type (I haven't decided on how low a level yet)
2) *Experience Points* through adventuring will come in the way of spending evolution points.
3) As you acquire evolutions points you spend them modify aspects of your creation, or even add new things. (Limbs, immunities, etc)
4) The greater the difference of your change or modification from your current state, the more evolution points it will require.

This is of course just a very basic idea, but I am excited to get input on it and perhaps some more ideas for what would work well in such a system.

Start them out as a protozoa. And make them buy additional cells. >.>

Certainly a good idea although it will be more difficult to implement. By allowed players to move from such a small scale into a much larger it will involve creating multiple environments for players to exist. Amoebas aren't exactly aware of elephants and vice versa. I will look into it =)

What did Spore do, and what worked and what didn't? It generated an awful lot of hype, but then AFAIK it kind of fell off the radar...

Didn't it even fall so far under the radar they recently announced it could be played for free? That's almost tempting enough to take them up on it.

Yeah it did fall fast...I played it for a bit and it was quite a bit of fun. Maybe I should go nab it and play some more for ideas

That's what you get for making me do administrative things when I'm dead tired, and trying to watch TV. > Accidents happen.

But seriously. Protozoa. Because it's a cool word.

Also, Spore fell off the map because it didn't pan out like people thought it would. And then there was the issue with all the bad publicity the DRM got, and a lot of people just ended up turned off to it. But it was a novel concept. I don't know that it's anything I'd ever consider playing though, because it's simply not my style of game. I was never big on the Sims, or Sim City or any of that sort of micromanagement stuff. Life's just fine the way it is. I don't need to go create a bunch of random absurd looking little creatures for my own amusement. Now, shooting zombies.. That's my kind of entertainment.

I very seriously almost bought Spore when it actually cost money. The concept was novel enough to be interesting to me. The big turn off, like so many others, was the nasty DRM. SecuROM is evil incarnate as far as copy protection. Spyware looks tame compared to it.

What if you could evolve into Warhammer 40k Tyranids and rip zombies limb from limb with your horrible alien claws?

UNRELATEDLY, if someone ever makes such a game (consistent with my what-if), please inform me.

While I have to agree with that statement, lol, I also have to agree with Chris that it might be a little too small-scale for a MUD concept. For things like combat, communication, interaction - it would take a bit of imagination to accomplish these. "Creatures" wouldn't necessarily wear armour or use weapons either so before you decide on the creature type you might want to step back and decide on what the game play would look like, such as what does one do to gain these exp points?

It is an interesting concept in that from start to finish (top level or whatever) it appears to offer a much wider range of character building as opposed to a typical MUD half-elf character wearing better made equipment to bully his way through mob bosses. One idea would be everyone starts as the same basic creature type and grows into different species, based on what they buy (body parts, immunities, skills ....could they learn spells?).

Hanaisse, I'm with you there. If I were too take the idea from "Spore", advancement seems to effectively rely on survival. They display it as "eating", however it is that you create has to eat. On smaller scales you absorb nearby nutrients, which often involves a "battle" of sorts. You have to defeat another create for the "meat" like food and perhaps battle another for the ability to eat the nearby plant like food. When the scale increases it stays the same. The actual experiences come from eating the food, but it's often not as simple as it sounds.

There's been a lot of Spore references so far, so the question to ask yourself is, do you want to create a game 'based on' Spore or use your imagination and creative license to build something unique? (personally I don't like 'based on' games).

Another idea that jumped out at me when you said "When the scale increases.." is to have parallel planes for different level ranges; ie: starting out on plane 1, where whatever you encounter won't kill you so that you can learn how to grow... then at a certain point (exp, age, level or something) you're moved into plane 2 where you can 'combat' whatever and learn new skills, then plane 3 where the difficulty increases from there, and so on.

I don't know, I'm still thinking it would be challenging to watch yourself evolve on a text based game. Not impossible mind you, it would just take as I said before, imagination.

I'm not actually interested in making it "based on" Spore. It is just that as one of the few games that have actually done it they are certainly worth looking at for ideas. The plane system that you mentioned is also what I imagined when thinking of how it could be done. What worries me with that is the separation of players. Some would view the game as less active if they are consistently separated from other players. Also, it certainly would take quite a bit of imagination, all I can think of to help with that is exhaustive description of each change.

I guess there's pros and cons to the planes type system. There could be many players on the same plane at the same time or there could only be one player. Who knows. It's just a different concept than the typical ranged areas set-up of MUDs with players wandering into higher level territories and getting eaten alive.

Overall, the evolution theme is an interesting, and not over-done, idea. The curiosity factor itself could draw the players. Good luck.

I think that you might find this Flash game fascinating (and somewhat addictive). The idea is that you start out as a little chomping thingy, and you chomp things, which makes you grow; as you go "down" levels, there are more things to chomp, but eventually things that chomp you back. You can't actually die; if you run out of "life" you get knocked up some levels and go back to being a smaller chompy thingy.

Anyhow, it's a rather interesting example of a very simple game concept, relating to "evolving" your chompy creature from small to large, that produces a strangely compelling experience.