Original game idea: The Pecking Order

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Just wanted to share a game idea that I think could stand out as a unique project if somebody made it into an actual game. I have been mulling over it for years, but since I work full-time on a completely different project with different target audience, I can’t implement it myself, unfortunately. So it’s free for grabs. Maybe somebody here will be interested.

So…

The Pecking Order - a game about brutal survival in a chicken coop.

You play as a rooster and your task is to dominate all other roosters and chicken in order to raise your status in the pecking order. This can be done by attacking roosters whenever they try to feed and mate with chicken. At the same time, you should feed and mate with chicken as much as possible. The goal is to make everybody but you permanently stressed and malnourished, so they can’t challenge your status at the top of the pecking order.

By the end of each day, there is your human owner coming with an axe, and picks the most weak rooster/chicken (at the bottom of the “pecking order”) to kill and cook.

You could also compete for best sunbathing/dust bathing spots, shelter from bad weather, best perches, etc. Basically for everything chicken do in daily life. As young chicks hatch and begin to grow, you can peck them too, to weaken and impede development. Because otherwise they’ll grow adult and challenge you. But this should be done when the human is not watching you - because if he catches you doing this shit to chicks, he’ll come to punish you.

Each day the difficulty will increase a bit, because your rooster will age and lose some strength/speed, so you’ll have to rely more and more on strategy and intelligence to prevent sinking to the bottom of the social ladder. Also there will be new and fresh roosters released into the coop occasionally. The game still will inevitably end with the executioner coming after you, so the goal is to get the best score surviving as many days as possible.

Unlike games from “animal simulator” genre (bear simulator, pigeon simulator, etc.), there will be no areas to explore and no quests to complete. Instead, all gameplay will be focused on raising your status in the pecking order and defending it against your fellow chicken. I think that could make such a project really stand out, because there are very few games (if any?) exploring social hierarchy struggle in animal life.

The entire game map will consist of one chicken coop + some background outside it. 3D models of chicken/roosters with most required animations could be bought from the Asset Store or Turbosquid, so all of that is pretty easy. Most of work would be invested into making realistic AI and behavior of chicken/roosters that takes into account their social status. The entire project could be finished in few months ~ half a year, I think.

Feel free to comment/complement this idea.

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love it. But I’d change name to “Bad Chicken”

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That actually sounds like a cool little project.

If the core game loop works, you can add occasional random events just to mix things up. Potential examples: It’s Christmas, and for the next 5 days there’s a turkey in the coop, hoovering up food and ignoring the pecking order. The owner has a kid, who takes a chicken as a pet for a few days, which reappears stronger when the kid loses interest.

A different layer of random could be changing what successfully woo’s a chicken from time to time, so that no one strategy is dominant in the long term. One day you’ve got to beat up another rooster. Another day you need to bring them food. Another day you need to avoid fights, etc.