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Nice Games Jam: "Dinosaurs of North Dakota"

Mar 13, 2025

00:00

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

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