Otherworld - a game I'm working on

It might be possible to generate a description based on it's components, but it might be repetitive if you don't use different sentence structures. For example a dress description could be: "A plain white cotton dress. It has a standard u-neck, it is sleeveless and has an empire waistline, with a hem reaching half-thigh. The skirt is flared. It has two flap-covered pockets over the hips. The cloth used is thin and soft." You could swap out any of the details and it would calculate the cloth cost based on how much material is needed.

 

Status update: Items and resources page, drop, pick up and eating have been implemented. It's also possible to see inside containers (although not sub-containers).

 

Currently in the database there's palm frond hut and tent, and test house. For containers there's the wooden barrel and several pots. My idea is that more complicated houses will use componental building.

Example of material selections:

floor base

dirt floor
stone floor
split timber floor
plank floor

flooring

sprigs
palm fronds
hay
slate
coarse planks
sanded planks
parquet
tile floor
mosaic floor

insulation

none
air
sprigs
hay
wool
cotton
asbestos

support structure

none
sticks
planks
bamboo
wooden beams
stacked stone pillars
brick pillars
solid stone pillars
bronze trusses
steel girders

Not all combinations are necessarily possible, for example if you're going to build a multi-layer floor, you're probably going to need a plank base because if you just stacked stones on top of insulation, it presumably wouldn't support a person's weight.

 

I've been thinking about the timelines system recently. My husband says it's so complicated that he can't wrap his head around it. Currently every RL day is one month ingame, and each player can spend their time inside that month as they please. They gain AP through resting, and can rest as many times as necessary. AP caps at 1000, so it's necessary to alternate between resting and other activities (foraging, traveling, crafting). If they reach the end of the month, they are prevented from spending or regaining AP until the next month starts and everybody gets moved to the beginning of that month on their internal timelines whether or not they played all their AP.

Using 2 AP takes one minute of game time, one game hour is 60 minutes, there are 12 hours in a day and 24 days in a month. The reason for allowing people to play as fast as they can click is that if each hour of real time was one day, people would be forced to sleep through about 8 days a month, or even 16-18 if they have a full day job. The only way to allow people to be active when they're not online is some sort of automation based around routines, but that would be difficult to arrange. There are so many variables involved. What if your daily routine is "forage until you find something to eat, cook what you found, repeat until you're no longer hungry and then gather building materials"? But what if you get unlucky and don't find anything to eat? Or what if it's raining and you can't make a fire to cook? Also, if you were to travel automatically, you would have to decide in advance are you going to stop or keep going if you run into strangers along the way, because they could be friends or foes. If you ran into some people at 3 AM while you were sleeping, your travel would either stop and you could no longer catch up the next day, or you would keep going and find out you're 160 km past a person you could've talked to or traded with. I would prefer as little automation as possible, without making things stretch over multiple real life days. Every decision that requires human input must be made within 24 (or 18) hours real time or it gets automatically resolved, to stop inactive players from holding active ones back. This is the reasoning behind the current system. Also the reason one day is one month instead of one day being the same on both clocks (like in Cantr), is that one of the major parts of the game is a farming system, and it wouldn't make any sense if crops only took 3 to 5 days to mature. Sure, there's Farmville, but I'm striving for more realism. I want to make it so that if you don't plan your moves wisely, you do risk starving or freezing to death on the more challenging regions. I don't want this to be like a walk in the park, like Cantr that has stagnated because there are piles of 100+k of raw meat that never rot, and anybody can cook them even decades later without getting food poisoning.

The main problem caused by individual timelines is that very rarely are two players exactly in the same moment on their internal timelines. Currently I'm considering two people to be in the same time if they are within the same ingame hour (and day, obviously). Minutes don't matter as much. They're pretty much cosmetic. Also currently items/resources aren't bound to time, so if someone harvests things on day 24 and leaves them on the ground, they are accessible to a person who is in day 1 on their timeline. I should probably change that. If two people were in the same location at the same time at any given moment in the past, they are allowed to start conversations (scenes) with each other, and have them take place in that precise moment. They can then keep extending them even after having moved on. But for combat to happen, two or more people need to be in the same moment. I think in most cases that means the end of the month. Someone plays all their AP and is unable to run away, so anybody who catches up to them is able to initiate combat. They must resolve the combat before either one of them is allowed to start playing the next month, so it's beneficial for both of them to act fast and avoid the automatic combat that ensues if they don't resolve it in time. Naturally fights can also happen earlier on the timeline, but then people risk losing days from the end of the month if they don't resolve the combat before the next month starts.

The reason why people shouldn't be allowed to interact with someone who's in an earlier point on their timeline is that even though that person is in the same location in the beginning of the month, there's no telling if they'll actually stay there up to the time when your timelines cross. For all you know, they might leave, or even die.

I could use some feedback on the time system. Is it all Greek to you or can you wrap your heads around it, or see where I'm coming from?

 

As long as people spend time in the same locations, they should have no trouble interacting with each other. The main problem arises from interacting with travelers/explorers, and them interacting with city folk. I've already eliminated the requirement for people to be in vicinity of each other inside a local map, it's enough that they are anywhere on the same map, even if the distance could be up to 1.3 kilometers. Because movement inside a local map doesn't cost AP, you can imagine that if a character wants to talk to someone else, they will go to that person.

 

People start scenes around different themes or subareas such as the market square or cotton fields, and people who feel the location is relevant to their character can join in and chat with other participants. Scenes always take place either in the present or the past, never the future. So if you were in a location, even for 5 minutes, then someone starts a scene that covers that 5 minute stretch in time, you can participate in the conversation. Each minute allows 12 lines, including people joining and leaving. 5 minutes is the minimum duration, and 4 hours is the maximum. Say you have several characters picking cotton every day for several hours, otherwise it might get boring but they can start a scene and chat with each other to make the work seem lighter. Another examples would be a hunting party, or a secret conspiracy. People can participate when they are either spending time in the location (idle), foraging, manufacturing, hunting or resting. Although when you're resting, technically you're asleep through the majority of the time, but the game can assume you're just chilling without falling asleep. People can also pass items and resources to each other. If someone is ahead on their timeline and tries to pass something to a person who's earlier on their timeline, it creates a pending give and the other person will receive the object once they catch up on their timeline. I'm assuming most people will concentrate their giving actions on the beginning of each month when there's the most people in the same time at once.

 

I haven't decided yet if there's going to be a built in trade system or if people will just hand over stuff to each other and hope that the other person gives you what they promised instead of running away with the goods. Because technically it's a bit unnatural if a system forces you to give what you have promised without any chance of double crossing people. If there's going to be a trade system, it will most likely be like in Kingdom of loathing where one person selects what they want to trade, then the other person makes a counter offer and if the first person accepts the trade, it will be completed.

Also if someone runs away with stuff they had promised to give you, unless they are physically faster than you, you can run after then and confront them.

As for auctions, that would work through a scene where people make bids and the auctioneer trades with the winner. So that wouldn't need a built-in system.

Since we have NPCs, there are likely going to be NPC shops, but one of the fundamental ideas is that no items or resources will be created from thin air (maybe with the exception of giving new societies a kick start), so NPCs who manufacture items will need the ingredients provided to them by PCs or other NPCs. Also they won't produce endless stock, so if something isn't selling, they will stop producing more of it and also won't accept duplicates in barter. This reminds me of Caravaneer, where shopkeepers had quotas for certain things like water bottles, and once you had sold the maximum to them, they refused to buy any more. Because random encounters were producing them endlessly, you would eventually have to discard them because you had saturated the market.

But in my game, instead of NPC highwaymen spawning with equipment, they need to get them from some other NPC or PC, either through trade or stealing. NPCs will gather their own resource pools that they use to manufacture items and feed themselves. NPCs will be interested in the same items PCs are, so if PCs are buying for example a lot of jewelry, NPCs will be influenced to buy some too, but if nobody is buying things like acorns or wood chips, then NPCs will know they are worthless and refuse to accept them as currency. The market will be affected by laws of supply and demand.

 

I might not include magic at all because it could cause problems. But one thing I have considered having is rare paranormal phenomenon, like portals between distant buildings that are opened by staff and players don't know how to create them. If you go through one, you don't know what's on the other side or if you'll ever get back. It might also kill every nth person to pass through it, or cause physical harm. Aspects like this should be rare so that they won't be considered mundane. Also magic generates easy fixes like resurrection and quick healing. In my game you might win a fight only to bleed to death afterwards, and death is permanent (although I'm considering to allow people to remember small things from a past life as long as it's nothing critical). I'm thinking in my world reincarnation is real, but not all people remember their past lives.

 

Technically reincarnation wouldn't be coded, but there would be a guideline that it's not forbidden to decide that your new character inherited the soul of an old character and can remember tidbits from their life. Eventually a person should move on and let the new character develop into a new personality, but in the beginning it's interesting if a child is talking about past lives, especially if it's vague and not like "my name was X and I lived in location Y". There have been cases in real life where a child was saying they died in a fire and used to be a black woman, then their parents found a story of a woman who died while jumping out of a burning building that matched a lot of the details. Also there were twins that died and soon after another pair of twins was born in the same family, and they would remember things that their dead sisters had seen even though they had never met because the older sisters died before the younger twins were ever born. They would also recognize their old toys and remember their names.

I will make it clear from the start that nobody lives forever, and eventually characters will die of old age if they live old enough. It won't be a strict limit but the chances of dying will get higher as a person ages, so that 99% will have died until the age of 120. A person will be alerted 24 hours in advance so that they can choose to rp the death if they wish. Also life choices can be used to shorten the life if a person wants the character to die earlier. I'm considering that it should be possible to "accidentally on purpose" kill yourself as a child if you don't like your situation. You can drown or fall of a cliff or swallow a needle. Sure the parents' players will know OOCly it was a suicide, but they will be required to play it as a tragic accident. Also all things that can potentially harm a person when swallowed will have a warning, but people can choose to eat poisonous things and small doses might not kill you. For example, all mushrooms count as dangerous, but your local knowledge will define the chance of picking a poisonous mushroom. Some just make you hallucinate instead of dying.

 

Yes, there will definitely be family trees and legacies. It's one of the cornerstones of the game. Everybody is related to somebody, well, save for the initiators of new societies.

If a person takes big risks then they also risk dying from it. I assume this will divide communities into thrill-seekers and security-seekers. People who want adventure will hunt the big game, there might be mastodons in the final version. One thing I've learned from Cantr is that making hunting trivial can easily ruin the whole thing. There should always be a risk of injury when facing dangerous animals, no matter how small. In Cantr if you get a strong enough shield, you can deflect anything. In my game there's always a chance an animal will get past your shield. Also they can attack multiple times if you don't kill them fast enough. And wolves and such should come in packs. I remember in Fallout 2, a pack of wild dogs is a considerable enemy even though you can kill one or two in one turn. They surround you and you can't get away. A shield shouldn't protect you from all sides. And even if you're wearing an armor, you have some vulnerable spots. A pack of animals might make you fall down and gouge out your eyes.

Going with a group should be encouraged. But cooperation with people who might be from other timezones than you can be hard. Even if you were allowed to plan a raid using real life times, it's hard to get more than two players on the same schedule. One possibility would be that the team selects a leader, and the leader gets to control the actions of the other team members without them being online. The team members can set limits they won't cross, but anything inside their comfort zone they will do without questioning. The rp related to the battle or hunt can be added with delay over the course of multiple days using a scene. Since the things have technically already happened, you know what you need to write and won't have to wait.