First things first, hello you there my dear reader! Hope you're having a good day.

I recently joined My First Game Jam: Winter 2022, as suggested by a friend of mine to get my shit together and actually finish a project. The theme of the jam was Nature so I took it and tried to make a game around it. The deadline is very short (it's just 14 days!), so I have just enough time to make a light-rule game, which in itself is fine. If you've got time at hand to spare, you should join as well!

Now, what I'm struggling with right now is the choice of the game's skills.

Elevator Pitch

Hunter's Cradle is a prehistoric-themed game of big-game hunters trying to gather enough food for their families and the whole village to survive. What sacrifices will they make to collect more food and what sacrifices will they make if they didn't collect enough?

Long story short, the game loop of the game has characters leaving their village and trying to hunt down some big-ass roaming mammals, gather food, and come back to their village. Rinse and repeat.

I'm picturing a group of prehistoric hunters finding and following tracks, sneaking around and fighting predators, praying over their ancestors for protection, and foraging meat from enemies' dead bodies.

Prehistoric Skills

One thing I'm keen on, as of lately, is trying to write a skill-based system without attributes, an idea that I've been reading more and more around here lately. I think that, in this specific setting, personal skills would be more important than actual attributes, so I'd rather throw my hat in the ring here.

As far as skills go, for the moment, I'm brewing with:

• Melee - Push, pull, be strong
• Tactics - Pack combat, know-how about battles and hunts
• Leap - Run, jump, climb
• Listen - Perceive by hearing, know-how about animal cries
• Spot - Perceive by watching,
• Throw - Throw weapons from afar, Hunt
• Forage - Hunt or fish small game, removing flesh from bodies
• Craft - Make new tools on the spot, fix broken tools
• Heal - Threat infected cuts, know-how about bodies and organs
• Prowl - Sneaky sneaky rogue action
• Bluff - Convince with lies,
• Intimidate - Scare away, impress with physical strength
• Conciliate - Pacify, make compromises

But I really like how Blades in the Dark handled this by grouping them and making one being determined by the others. I'd like to group them somehow logically (like BitD actions), but I'm kinda stuck at it. As far as glaring missings I think I'd like something like animal/nature-wise knowledge-y oriented, but I just can't put my fingers on a suited term for it. Since the game has

I'd rather end up with a list of less than 12/16 grouped skills, but this is just my first draft at it.

I'm wondering if there are any obvious holes, gaps in the listed skills or if you think there is too much logical overlap.