Dinosaurs of North Dakota

#381
Nice Games Jam: "Dinosaurs of North Dakota"
2025.03.13
Art of various Cretaceous creatures.

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
1
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