Working title: Otherworld
Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2016 4:00 pm
I've been working on an idea of my own game ever since before I started Cantr. Back in 2011 I started planning it out in more detail and did some coding in 2012, but then I dropped it for several years. Again in January 2016 I did a bit of writing, then in June I started planning it in more detail and also coding. At first I didn't want to say anything because it seemed unclear if I was going to get very far with it, but now as I have advanced more in it, I decided to create a topic for it. Well, my Facebook friends have been hearing about it earlier. I've been working on it pretty much daily for two months now.
The basic ideas of the game:
- to explore and discover new resources
- to develop communities with different culture
- to advance from hunter-gatherers to farmers
- to advance from stone age to iron age
- to plant seeds acquired from other islands
- to cross-breed different local varieties to develop crops with superior qualities
- to form families and take care of your offspring
- to employ (or enslave ) NPCs to do the menial and repetitive tasks
Major differences to Cantr:
- Most plants are only native to one island or corner of a continent. It will be necessary to travel to discover them all.
- there will be children
- there will be NPCs
- there is an AP system
- time is faster and flexible - one day in real life is one month ingame, but within that month, the players can use their time and AP as they please, either in one go or divided to several play times a day
- it will be possible to add stuff to scenes (chats) that happened in the past, as long as your character was present when it took place
- all combat actions will be resolved after 18 RL hours from initiation - sooner if the target logs in earlier
- there will be an advantage to discarding obsolete technologies once new ones are discovered (no using bone knives next to steel tech)
- building components can be mixed and matched, so you can select the material for different parts of the house
- players are allowed to plan out societies outside of the game and have them start out with some equipment instead of starting from scratch
- players in a community can create pending characters that are written as detailed RP characters and can then be picked by a player who doesn't have a character in the community in advance
- communities are allowed to set their own OOC code of conduct (such as if it's allowed to have sex in public, in which case underage players will be unable to enter the town)
- it will be possible to "spawn" as a neuter (a character who has no sexual organs or external traits of either sex)
Things that have been coded:
- preset editor (the thing that allows adding categories and object types, and adding related features such as weapon class)
- character list
- the possibility to watch characters that are not played by you (in the final system, the player can invite watchers, they are visible to the player and can be kicked at any time, but there's also a possibility of invisible watcher, which is similar to PD's ability to view other people's characters)
- scene system (chat)
- land traveling system, including hindrance from ground vegetation and swampiness and steep hills
- a local map system that knows how many trees are per are in a mapped location, where buildings and people are located, the possibility to visualize roads
- the possibility to generate new local maps automatically based on a global map
- current system for rivers (in the future the same system can be used for sea currents)
- action point usage (partially)
- activity logging system
- natural resource deposit finding and gathering system
- automatic memorizing of deposits, possibility to forget deposit and automatic purging of oldest deposits from the memory if the amount exceeds 100
- dynamic naming of locations
- random naming system for NPCs (each zone has a different pool of names)
Things that exist in the database:
- 129 animal types
- 194 natural resources
- 243 derived resource subtypes (some of these are related to resources that haven't been implemented yet)
- total 6636 rows in 47 tables, some of these are obsolete and will be removed later
Currently I'm working on adding tool presets to the database. I'm trying to start from stone age and add the types in a reasonable order so that if I decide to leave some for later, the game will be playable up to a certain tech level.
This is the list of planned tools and machines I'm going to add. It also has a few techniques in the mix because I didn't know which tools they need. Viewing in full size recommended. Am I forgetting anything major? The technology range is stone age to iron age.
Screenshots:
Viewing a memorized resource deposit.
Viewing memorized resource deposits.
Dynamic naming
Foraging first page, where you select what to forage for and how many AP to spend searching (max)
What happens if you run into a mountain side that's too steep to climb (yes, there are altitude differences)
Local map view
A location that hasn't been unlocked
Local map of a swampy location
What happens if you run into a shore
I realize that there's already a game called Otherworld and it's a sex game, so I should eventually come up with a new name, but for now I'm sticking with this one.
The basic ideas of the game:
- to explore and discover new resources
- to develop communities with different culture
- to advance from hunter-gatherers to farmers
- to advance from stone age to iron age
- to plant seeds acquired from other islands
- to cross-breed different local varieties to develop crops with superior qualities
- to form families and take care of your offspring
- to employ (or enslave ) NPCs to do the menial and repetitive tasks
Major differences to Cantr:
- Most plants are only native to one island or corner of a continent. It will be necessary to travel to discover them all.
- there will be children
- there will be NPCs
- there is an AP system
- time is faster and flexible - one day in real life is one month ingame, but within that month, the players can use their time and AP as they please, either in one go or divided to several play times a day
- it will be possible to add stuff to scenes (chats) that happened in the past, as long as your character was present when it took place
- all combat actions will be resolved after 18 RL hours from initiation - sooner if the target logs in earlier
- there will be an advantage to discarding obsolete technologies once new ones are discovered (no using bone knives next to steel tech)
- building components can be mixed and matched, so you can select the material for different parts of the house
- players are allowed to plan out societies outside of the game and have them start out with some equipment instead of starting from scratch
- players in a community can create pending characters that are written as detailed RP characters and can then be picked by a player who doesn't have a character in the community in advance
- communities are allowed to set their own OOC code of conduct (such as if it's allowed to have sex in public, in which case underage players will be unable to enter the town)
- it will be possible to "spawn" as a neuter (a character who has no sexual organs or external traits of either sex)
Things that have been coded:
- preset editor (the thing that allows adding categories and object types, and adding related features such as weapon class)
- character list
- the possibility to watch characters that are not played by you (in the final system, the player can invite watchers, they are visible to the player and can be kicked at any time, but there's also a possibility of invisible watcher, which is similar to PD's ability to view other people's characters)
- scene system (chat)
- land traveling system, including hindrance from ground vegetation and swampiness and steep hills
- a local map system that knows how many trees are per are in a mapped location, where buildings and people are located, the possibility to visualize roads
- the possibility to generate new local maps automatically based on a global map
- current system for rivers (in the future the same system can be used for sea currents)
- action point usage (partially)
- activity logging system
- natural resource deposit finding and gathering system
- automatic memorizing of deposits, possibility to forget deposit and automatic purging of oldest deposits from the memory if the amount exceeds 100
- dynamic naming of locations
- random naming system for NPCs (each zone has a different pool of names)
Things that exist in the database:
- 129 animal types
- 194 natural resources
- 243 derived resource subtypes (some of these are related to resources that haven't been implemented yet)
- total 6636 rows in 47 tables, some of these are obsolete and will be removed later
Currently I'm working on adding tool presets to the database. I'm trying to start from stone age and add the types in a reasonable order so that if I decide to leave some for later, the game will be playable up to a certain tech level.
This is the list of planned tools and machines I'm going to add. It also has a few techniques in the mix because I didn't know which tools they need. Viewing in full size recommended. Am I forgetting anything major? The technology range is stone age to iron age.
Screenshots:
Viewing a memorized resource deposit.
Viewing memorized resource deposits.
Dynamic naming
Foraging first page, where you select what to forage for and how many AP to spend searching (max)
What happens if you run into a mountain side that's too steep to climb (yes, there are altitude differences)
Local map view
A location that hasn't been unlocked
Local map of a swampy location
What happens if you run into a shore
I realize that there's already a game called Otherworld and it's a sex game, so I should eventually come up with a new name, but for now I'm sticking with this one.