Otherworld - a game I'm working on

Complete randomness certainly simplifies things, and also it makes it possible to find a good source next to a poor source, so it encourages exploration. Also if I decide to change it later, I know how to do it. Resources like stone and wood are so abundant that I don't think people will ever harvest all of those, but things like wild food resources can be foraged by a small community. Also in the future when I get NPCs implemented, an NPC population in a local map will reduce the natural resources because it is assumed that they are foraging out of the same pool.

 

I didn't notice your other message, I was replying to the first one.

I haven't yet worked on the combat system coding-wise because it's one of the most complicated parts of the game. If I give it some thought, I might be able to simplify it. It's usually good to finish the thought process before you code something, because if you start coding with an unfinished idea, you often have to go back and change things you already wrote, sometimes even scrapping a whole page.

The main thing is that combat isn't supposed to be the driving force of the game. The driving force is to develop communities and arrange the farming so that you can keep your townspeople supplied, as well as develop a culture distinct from other towns in the form of clothing, pottery, arts and crafts. But it's necessary to have the possibility of combat so that if somebody threatens your way of living or if someone commits crimes, there will be a means to bring on justice. All physical exercise will make you stronger, including fighting. Fighting also improves your proficiency in what ever weapon you're using. You learn something even if you lose, assuming you don't get killed. So winning a fight isn't rewarded over losing a fight, the main thing is that you get what you want, be it wealth or justice or get rid of an annoying individual.

Also once characters get old enough, they will start growing weaker with age, so strength is a bell curve. This will prevent experienced characters from becoming immortal and all-mighty, giving younger characters a chance to rise up in the ranks. Old characters will need to name heirs and write wills because life has limited duration. However, to get a character into very old age, you have to play for 3 real life years. That takes commitment. Most people will give up before then, but there might be players who stick around for 10+ years like I did with Cantr, so it's important that lifespans are limited from the beginning, because if a cap is added later on, people will raise a fuss.

 

Here are a couple of screenshots about what I've accomplished today.
The foraging form:

A hasty version of a found and memorized gathering spot.

In the background I needed to create the resource pool for the location when the player visits the Activities page. Then it needs to pick one of the resource gathering spots based on how common or rare they are. If "Search for things you cannot see" is selected, it will first try to search for hidden resources, using up to the selected number of AP. If it fails to find anything, then if a visible resource is selected, it will be found currently with 5 AP in any case, but I should make it so that it takes longer sometimes. If no visible resource is selected, there is a high chance you come back empty-handed.

I'm going to make the gathering page prettier in the future. Also I need to figure out numbers for how much can be gathered with 20 AP per resource. In the future there will be tools that speed up gathering.

 

Today's screenshots:

You can now give locations descriptions and handles, so you can recognize that you've been there before.

I added the gathering values per 20 AP. For most resources it's 10% of maximum deposit size, but there is some variation. Also rocks are capped at 5000 grams per 20 AP and most gems are 5 or 10 grams per 20 AP.


I added location names for resource spots in other locations so you can tell them apart. You can also rename them from that page. I also made the links more blue so people can tell they are links. There's also the possibility of forgetting a resource spot. Currently it just deletes it and doesn't go back to the pool, but I'm planning to change that later.

Next step should be implementing gathering.

 

I had to work relatively late to get today's update finished. First I entered minimum and maximum weights for countable resources, such as fruit and vegetables. Small things like berries and nuts are considered uncountable at this stage. Later on they will be measured in handfuls and other units of volume.

Next I wrote up the gather function and tested it. Then when I got it working, I made it reduce AP and get logged like searching for resources and traveling does. Then I wrote the page that processes the form data. Pretty much all of my pages need to check in the beginning that the user is authenticated, the character is selected and the user is allowed to view this particular character, so I just copypaste that part. I could probably turn it into functions to make it shorter but then I would need to go back and edit all the pages. I have a class called player but it only has one function and that is used only for the character list. I realize it would make sense to use it for authentication. I will have to think about this.

Trivia: A jackfruit can weigh 35 kg. That is the biggest fruit in my game.

 

Today I have read up on ancient metallurgy. I realized that I forgot to add copper and tin to my map. I also read about making stone tools and added all the main ones into the database. Chipped stone tools can be made of flint, chert, basalt or obsidian (flint is the best), while ground stone tools can be made of granite, rhyolite or basalt. I read about the ancient Egyptians using a copper saw and sand to saw stone. They could also drill holes with sand and a stick. That's pretty amazing.

I've started thinking that I'm going to need to write a guide on how to advance in the game, because people might feel overwhelmed by all the resources and manufacturing options. Technology follows certain paths and you need to start from the bottom of the tree unless you get help from a more advanced civilization. My hope is that most communities will be able to develop out of stone age and enter bronze or iron age instead of using stone tools next to metal tools. I might have to look at how the key ores overlap to see which areas have the potential to start metal production.

 

Today I have been writing a list of object types to implement and values for them (mainly weight but also weapon class for anything that can be used as a weapon, and hands required to wield). I calculated that a rectangular fireplace that goes up to the ceiling weighs at least 2000 kg! That's surprisingly heavy. It literally takes two tonnes of bricks.

I posted my idea on another forum and got two people interested in helping me with the project.

 

As far as I understood, they're both familiar with programming. Also one said he knows a guy who's good with front end and could help with css and javascript. I suck at javascript so I'm generally trying to avoid it as much as possible. I wrote a list of what needs to be done and it's very long, so it would be good to split the load. I haven't yet found out what they're interested in working on, but I'm hoping to have people write some classes or at least functions for them. They can also make suggestions for object design.

The work list:

Things that need to be worked on approximately in this order:

- adding tools and machines into presets and assigning attributes such as weight (I'm currently working on this)
- objects list (includes inventory at the top of the page)
- seeing things inside containers/ recursive view that keeps checking the children of an object until there are none
- manufacturing system
- dynamic naming of people (borrows mostly from location naming system, so easy); changing your own name
- people list
- sailing system (initially with one ship type)
- making endurance affect how far you can walk in one go
- following/tracking system (based on charloctime)
- clothing
- armor
- PvP combat system
- NPC system
- character creation (requires NPCs as parents)
- mating and pregnancy
- using NPCs in combat
- the ability to assign activities to other people or cooperate on foraging/farming
- the ability to claim the AP for a new day through resting (limit 24 times in one IG month)
- making it switch to a new month every RL day (this can be run manually when it's not on a web server)
- aging system
- foods
- cooking system
- eating and hunger (average people get hungry after spending 240 AP, so if they eat every time they get hungry, they need to eat 3 times a day)
- buildings
- locks and lockpicking
- change charloctime to bunch up actions that have the same type and AP cost, such as multitraveling (currently it's over 2700 rows from my test character's exploration and I feel that's too much for one character.)
- make it possible to view a log of how you've spent your AP
- farming system
- crossbreeding system
- hunting system
- animal domestication
- riding and carts
- adding more ship types
- possibility to cut stone blocks of a selected size
- means to transport heavy things (such as using rollers)
- mining tunnels, other underground structures, possibility of natural caves
- steam engine?

 

As for the weapons, I'm trying not to add too many because Cantr has a whole bunch, yet most people are only using battle axe and crossbow because they're the best. I'm trying to make it so that for example a dagger is more effective in the hands of a weak character than a battle axe.

What are currently in the database are short sword, long sword and big club. The ones that I'm planning to add are iron-tipped spear, steel-tipped spear, stone-tipped spear, throwing spear, blackjack (that's leather with a lead weight), bone club, iron-spiked club, obsidian-spiked club, wooden bat (basically a baseball bat), wooden club, wooden truncheon, composite bow, crossbow, primitive bow and recurve bow. I'm going to add more swords but I need to make sure there are not too many. If they have identical build requirements then it's the same sword and people can just customize it differently.

It will also be possible to attack people for example with using a chair or a bench, but a bench takes several people to lift.

 

Not just all weapons, but all items will be customizable. Optimally even components of object such as hilts and buttons will be customizable, and it's possible to view what an item consists of and what different parts of it look like. When components are used to build a composite item, they don't just disappear but continue to exist as parts of the item. So for example to make a coat, you can use buttons of any material, and when you view details on the item, it will tell you which kind of buttons were used.

 

Well obviously the custom description couldn't conflict with the basic nature of the item, so a club is still a club how ever you describe it. But there could be more vague objects such as a wooden toy, that could be described as basically anything from a wooden horse to an adults only "toy". One thing that bugs me about Cantr is that people have started describing components and materials that weren't used in the basic building recipe of the item, it goes against the nature of the game to generate resources out of thin air. My game would have a wide range of possibilities regarding adding extra components to items, such as gems, spikes, beads, buttons etc, but it would be against the rules to describe an item as having a material that hasn't physically been added to it.