guns-germs-and-steel

A game aimed at modeling some of the high level takeaways from Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel"

Here's the book: https://books.google.com/books/about/Guns_Germs_and_Steel.html?id=kLKTa_OeoNIC#v=onepage&q&f=false

Here's an awesome couple videos which are essentially a summary of the book

Ameripox: The missing plague: https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
Zebras vs Horses - Animal Domestication: https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo

By CGP Gray

Essentially, those high level points are:

Race has nothing to do with the shape of history (western civilizations colonization and extermination of indigenous peoples across the planet)
The domestication of plants and animals is a key differentiator
The dominant axis of continents is critical to the spread of culture and resources
- The Americas are North-South vs. Eurasia's West-East axis
The density of human population and proximity of animals created plagues which were not present in less dense populations.

Those points above are why Europeans were able to decimate Native Americans, why the South African Pygmies have almost no remant of their native languages, and essentially accounts for the entire theory of how history has played out.

The Game

Modeling this I think would be an engaging and straight forward game to prototype!

I imagine a very simple real time strategy game where the player controls a character that Collects food. As they collect food they get a bit bigger until they "split".

As they move they get smaller and smaller. When they stop moving the simulation stops.

Some food fights back (animals). Hits shrink the players characters.

Some food can be captured (domestication). Captured food creates more food slowly. Allowing The player the ability to split faster.

Other players can be attacked.

Some "power ups" (technology) can be found which make the player attacks more powerful.

The goal is to eat the most food.

The key point is that all of this is distributed UNEVENLY.

Every interaction between a human and animal has an extremely low chance of Infecting the human with a plague. The plague will kill ~70% of infected humans.

Survivors are marked with that plague. Any interaction between that human and others without that plague marker has a chance to spread that plague to the non-marked human with the same chance of mortality. Ideally this roughly models populations with lots of animals and people being more likely to cause plagues.

Populations that are less dense will not have that plague, and this be at a disadvantage to those that have survived that plague.

Each animal can spread its own plague.

Tech Stack

The technologies to build the game are below.

Framework: PhaserJS

Phaser is a very approachable and ergonomic game dev framework.

Recently I stumbled onto a game named "Vampire Survivors" which is written With Phaser: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794680/Vampire_Survivors/

I was impressed by the number of entities on the screen at once, and paired with an ECS (Entity-Component-System) framework like bitecs https://github.com/NateTheGreatt/bitECS

I'm confident we have a lot going on the screen at once!

Language: Typescript

https://www.typescriptlang.org/

Typescript is a superset of JavaScript. It has more safety gaurantees so you don't accidentally try to add a number to a Cat. It's also super ergonomic and productive!

Editor: Intellij or VSCode