Otherworld - a game I'm working on

Yes, mainly the items will differ by custom description, although it's also possible to choose between different resources within slots. It will be possible to view which resources and components have been used to make an item. Also many things affect the general quality, which will eventually be visible.

I've been working on basic foods today. I'm posting a list of edible wild resources divided by region. The --- lines can only be crossed with a boat, and boats won't be in the first test. The first test will take place in the high priority island, which has the widest array of resources while having large land area. Most of the islands can support life, but it might not be comfortable without importing seeds from other islands. There are only a few regions that can have a varied enough diet without seeds from other islands. There's also spinach somewhere but I forgot where that is placed. The resources in parenthesis require more technology to process and won't be useful for early settlers. Shellfish is in parenthesis because it's only available on coasts.

Local resource pools

High priority:

zucchini
bell pepper
ancestral tomato
manioc
rambutan
banana
tangerine
avocado
wild strawberry
cashew
almond
cocoa
chili
allspice
(wheat)
(kidney beans)
(beans)

zucchini
pumpkin
bell pepper
chili
(wheat)

mushrooms
red cherry
wild rice -> (later real rice)
bamboo shoots
mustard
arrowroot (thickener)
acai berry
citrus fruit
hazelnut
ginseng
(maple syrup)
(barley)

lychee
apricot
mushrooms
pear
acai
bamboo shoots
peach
citrus fruit

peach
pear
poppy seed
soy
burdock
snowdrop onions
bamboo
radish
wild potato
bok choy
walnut
asparagus
cucumber
wild onion
mushrooms
water chestnut
watermelon
(beans)
(hops)

---

Medium high priority:

guembé fruit
wild apple
plantain
fig
raisin bush
(wheat)
(olives)

clover
mustard
raisin bush
asparagus
anise
sage
thyme
peppermint
rhubarb
wild yam
(rapeseed oil)
(spelt)
(oats)
(sorghum)
(barley)
(olives)
(coffee)

wild yam
caraway
wild carrot
date
almond
mango
plantain
coconut
pistachio
wild apple
manioc
raisin bush
(castor oil)
---

Medium priority:

allspice
pomegranate
jackfruit
crabapple
banana
starfruit
rambutan
(shellfish)
(kidney beans)

----

aloe vera
pomegranate
taro
allspice
rambutan
banana
amaranth
tangerine
starfruit
almond
crabapple
sour orange
jackfruit
avocado
nettles
(kidney beans)

---

Low priority

arrowroot
sweet potato
cherry tomato
asparagus
walnut
wild strawberry
chickweed
cattail
wild grape
black cherry
winter squash
hazelnut
(maple syrup)
(corn)
(kidney beans)
(beans)

clover
chickory
nettles
blueberries
raspberries
blackberries
lingonberries
mushrooms
fireweed
amaranth
wild licorice
(maple syrup)

---

lingonberries
blueberries
turnips
celery
sea-buckthorn
wild cabbage
beets
chickweed
nettles
parsnips
cranberries
(shellfish)

---

bladder cherry
pistachio
fig
persimmon
wild yam
coconut
papaya
manioc

---

coconut
snowdrop onions
ginger
nutmeg
wild apple
walnut
almond
wild carrot
mustard
mangosteen

---

clover
cattail
mushrooms
blackberries
raspberries
chives
snowdrop onions
sea-buckthorn
nettles
cattails
crabapple
shellfish
rowanberry
hazelnut

---

chives
blackberries
blueberries
cranberries

Also some mainly processed food resources that have been divided into slots.

Resource slot
acai berry 25
baobab fruit 25
citrus segments 26
coconut flesh (n/a now) 26
dates 24
deleafed bladder cherries 26
diced cactus fruit 25
diced crab-apple 26
diced jackfruit 25
diced mango 25
diced papaya 24
diced persimmon 25
diced watermelon 26
figs 24
mangosteen segments 25
peeled lychees 24
peeled rambutans 24
peeled wild apples 26
pitted apricot halves 26
pitted black cherries 24
pitted peach halves 24
pitted red cherries 24
pomegranate seeds 24
raisin bush berries 25
sliced banana 25
sliced carambolas 26
sour orange segments 26
tangerine segments 26
wild pear segments 25
boiled taro corms 27
chopped beets 27
chopped parsnips 28
chopped wild carrots 29
chopped wild yams 28
diced sweet potato 28
diced turnips 29
blanched asparagus 30
boiled manioc 31
boiled plantain 30
boiled wild onions 30
chopped ancestral tomatoes 32
chopped bell pepper 31
chopped celery 32
chopped water chestnuts 31
chopped wild cabbage 31
chopped wild celery 32
cooked bamboo shoots 32
diced squash 30
diced zucchinis 30
halved cherry tomatoes 32
sliced cucumber 30
sliced wild radishes 32
diced wild pumpkin (n/a) 32
allspice 33
aniseed 34
chopped chilies 34
chopped chives 34
chopped ginseng 33
chopped peppermint 33
chopped snowdrop onion 34
sage leaves 33
tamarind paste 33
thyme 34
boiled taro leaves 35
chopped bok choy 36
chopped nettle leaves 36
chopped spinach 36
mustard greens 35
turnip greens 35
chopped amaranth leaves 37
chopped chickweed 38
chopped spinach 37
clovers 37
cress 38
fireweed leaves 38
blanched cashew nuts 39
chopped almonds 39
chopped hazelnuts 39
chopped walnuts 39
shelled pistachios 39
toasted poppy seeds 39
blackberry mush 40
blueberry mush 40
cranberry mush 40
raspberry mush 40
sea-buckthorn mush 40

Resources in the same slot are interchangeable. I will mainly try to create recipes in the beginning that are possible to make without sailing between islands, so if a recipe requires more than two resources, there's already a chance that one of them doesn't have any local options. I have the vicinity lists for reference, but it's pretty limiting. Fruit salad will be the most available recipe, because most regions have three different fruits. But most root vegetables are concentrated on one island in the cold region, so it will be a while before they get discovered by explorers. Once the game is online, if some community gains access to a combination of resources that would make sense in real life but don't have a recipe yet, they can request to have it implemented.

Also as you can see from the list, most of the herbs are concentrated on one sub-region, so I imagine that's going to start getting a lot of trade at some point.

I've been trying to weed out bugs in the manufacturing system. For example, bone needle and iron knife differ by one, so originally all projects that were supposed to accept a bone needle as a tool were requiring an iron knife instead. Also some resources were applied to the wrong projects. I think I've gone through all the neolithic items by now, and probably all the wood craft as well, but I haven't seen it necessary to check the metal items yet because the means to produce metals haven't been implemented yet. The machines are there but as far as I can remember, copper and tin haven't been seeded yet. Also I need to figure out how mortar is made/what it's made of.

 

In the beginning I thought "no compromises" but now I'm up to the point that I'm willing to accept some compromises if they considerably speed up the development. New features can always be added later on. Right now it's most important to get the skeleton built before I can start adding the flesh. For example, before boats get implemented, it's unnecessary to implement any recipe that requires resources from two different islands because no one can access them. One of the first compromises I made is that the world is a cylinder, not a sphere. Originally I was going with a sphere, but it would've made programming traveling a royal pain. I would've really messed with people's heads when they were making maps. Another compromise I made recently is that it will be possible to access small amounts of wood without felling trees. I would still want to make sure that nobody can make large structures out of wood gathered in small pieces though. For that I'm going to have a resource called planks that is made out of splitting the trunks of felled trees. Once the game reaches steel age, there might also be water-powered sawmills, which will speed up plank-making. In the beginning logs will be split with adzes, later with with wedges and hammers. One of my ideas is that it will also be possible to record travel routes and a character can re-travel a route they have taken before with the click of a single button. It might also be possible to record routines for example for manufacturing or cooking: make the components, add them to the stage-2 project, finish the project, all in one click. That's going to take a lot of programming, though.

 

Thanks for the congratulations.

I hadn't heard of RimWorld before. This is probably not related but when I went to check out the Steam page, my taskbar froze and the Windows key stopped reacting, so I had to reboot to get it working again. That has never happened before.

It caught my eye in the screenshots that one of the characters was a nudist and another one a sex slave. It would be interesting to know how that works. Mentioning sex in games is always iffy, at least if they aren't clearly marked as Mature audiences only like Fallout.

I love reading manuals and walkthroughs, but I understand there are people who give up if they don't figure out a game straight away. I've read about what makes a good game, there was an article that was talking about the first Super Mario game. The first level teaches you everything you need to know of the controls and the rest of the game is just refining your timing and learning patterns. So the key is to build on top of things that have already been learned. In the other hand, there is a minigame where all you have to do is press a button. But the trick is that every level, something changes. When you move the mouse, the screen goes black and you can't see where the cursor is. Or when you move up, the cursor goes down. Games like that can be engaging because you can't get too comfortable with them. Every time you think you've figured it out, it throws something new at you. So games have to balance between two things, being too predictable and repetitive and being too chaotic.

People need to realize that the point of Otherworld is not just to get to Iron Age as soon as possible and then you have won the game. It's the journey that counts, the societies you form, the different customs you develop and the conflicts the differences between different cultures might create. If people only play it as a manufacturing game, they will quickly have built everything. I have four test characters but I mainly use one of them. I have reset the time a couple of times, but recently I have not been resetting it. After several days of playing, the ingame time has only progressed by 11 days. In that time, my test character has walked over 100 km to fetch wood from a rainforest and build about every Neolithic tool in game, including a stone anvil and dirt oven. Be that in the finished version, people will have to stop to cook and eat, so you can't spend all your AP traveling, and also there's going to be a tiredness factor that will limit how far you can walk without resting properly. Currently you can walk 90 km in 6 hours (half a game day) given that you had enough AP to begin with and the terrain isn't bad. In real life, nobody would have the energy to walk for 12 hours straight. You can walk the first 3 or so kilometers fast but after that you should start slowing down.

About developmental goals, one of my fundamental ideas is that there will never be plastic or electricity. There should eventually be steam-powered machines and vehicles, but I don't want to have the game turn into another Cantr where people ride cars while wielding bone knives. In fact, people should probably have a penalty for manufacturing things outside their tech level. I will probably need to extend the copper tools selection or otherwise it can't count as a full age. People would just jump straight to Bronze Age. Most of the copper and tin ores are in the temperate region, while the cold regions are more likely to have hematite, so it might be beneficial for Iron Age people to move to the cold region. I might need to make certain deposits get exhausted if it turns out there aren't enough reasons to populate the cold zone. Currently hematite is found in 7 different areas, so it might be too common. Coal is scattered in tiny spots all over the world, so there's a chance a person might walk right by it without seeing it. And limestone is pretty much all over the place. So basically once they get to Iron Age, it should be really easy to find resources. Although one problem will be transporting all three to the same location for processing. There might be some benefit to cold regions having snow during winter, because you can gather ores during the summer and fall, then transport them in a sleigh before you have invented the wheel necessarily.

 

I don't really go to Steam at all. I don't play modern games in general.

A bit off topic but: I don't like games where you only have one strategy that works in order to win, like Nethack, especially if it's counter-intuitive. It should be possible to reach goals through different paths. I've played Nethack repeatedly but the furthest I ever got was the castle level that has a lot of dragons. I found out in the tutorial that you need to have a magic whistle in order to lower the drawbridge. Like how is anybody supposed to know that if they don't read the cheats? Also I've read that later on there is a level that doesn't have stairs down and the only way to reach the next level is to fall through a hole. That's also counter-intuitive. But the biggest counter-intuitive thing is that you should avoid leveling up in the beginning and let your pet kill everything for you. It's because you can't get equipment that matches the level of the enemies, which rises as you level up, so you should restrict your development until you have gained equipment that is up to par. I think that is completely ass-backwards. Also the success of the game shouldn't be based on getting wishes granted because it happens so rarely. Also the game heavily penalizes experimentation, often in a deadly manner.

But about Otherworld, yes, people should develop the plotlines on a character level as well as a community-level. Characters should have personalities instead of being just an extension of the player.

About Cantr, it's a hodge-podge of different technology levels. Almost everybody uses bone knives, needles and stone hammers, just because they are usable where ever their iron and steel counterparts are. In the other hand, there are cars, gas ovens, radios, clothing with zippers and even implied electricity (the tajine doesn't require any fuel). Yet there is no power grid system or power plants. There's not even a waterworks system, so it's just assumed that everybody has water for cooking, while things like watering flowerboxes and brewing alcohol require water that is gathered at 400 grams a day max.

Back to Otherworld, I would eventually want to require big towns to have an aqueduct like in FreeCiv, and I would also like towns to require a sanitation system or they will start polluting the local fresh water and people will start getting ill. In Neolithic period, people can poop in the woods like bears, but as technology advances, they should start building outhouses, and in the latest stages of the game, sewer systems. There should be consequences for releasing human waste into the river where you take your drinking water from and wash your laundry in. People should get cholera from that. Generally the challenge level will go up as your technology advances and your cities grow. Neolithic villages can only support a small population, so if people want to build larger towns, they either need to invest in sanitation or spread out over a larger area.

I already addressed the matter earlier if what needs to be finished before play-testing. There needs to be a character generation system, a system of turning resources into refined resources, and also a way to acquire animal parts and wood. The latter one has been taken care of, because I made it possible to gather small amounts of wood through the foraging system without requiring the felling of trees. I could make a really simple hunting system, but then I would have to make a lot of changes to it afterwards, so I would rather build a system that can be used as a part of the finished system. People suggested to me elsewhere that I changed the manufacturing system so that there are set pools of resources that are always interchangeable, but that's going to be a lot of work, basically redoing what I already did on a case by case basis. I feel a bit defeated by the workload. I can't just say that okay, all wood is interchangeable, no: first of all, some woods are so hard that they can only be cut with an iron knife, not a stone knife. Those need separate projects. Secondly, some woods like raisin bush branches and pomegranate are so small that you can't make large things like planks and spear shafts with them. So I made a table that defines the characteristics of each wood type. Some like date palm and coconut timber are incapable of having thin branches, so if you want to make them to produce thin objects, you're going to need more tools to make the wood narrower before you can carve it. So they are best suited for making planks and other wide objects. Also camphor wood cannot be used for anything that involves storing food, because it would contaminate the food with its odor.

 

That's a good point about the character creation. I had totally forgotten about that as I was working on the fire system and moving on to the animals system. I still think I should have basic hunting in the first test, but currently the only thing you can do is view which animals are possible in your current location. Character creation might be easier to implement and would give me a break from the other two systems. I'm thinking of having some sort of a cap for how many characters can appear as adults in a single location within a short time, to prevent communities from being overwhelmed with thieves and troublemakers. In the test I can allow people to appear without a limit, but in the final version, there need to be limits to protect people.

As for having shops, this isn't the right time for that and would only complicate things. One of the fundamental ideas is that nothing is created out of thin air. Resources are harvested from nature and converted into items. So if there are NPC stores, they will buy resources from PCs and create items based on the same recipes PC crafters use. It can encourage mobility if an NPC for example requests copper ore when nobody has discovered it yet.

The current system requires entering each alternative resource separately, there are no pools except on my Excel sheet. If I make a typo, things can be assigned to the wrong project. It's a system that requires paying great care to which numbers are entered into it. If I had set resource pools, I would link to the pool rather than linking to individual resources, but it would require rewriting a lot of stuff.

Back to the character creation, my original idea was to have NPC breeding pairs in areas that have PCs, and each breeding pair could only parent one adult child a year. I might need to rethink that, otherwise I would have to have quite a lot of breeding pairs. It would make more sense to create the parents when they are needed and then if there happens to be a couple that has already bred a year ago or earlier, they could have a second child and produce siblings. Another idea is that locations can request a new PC to fill a certain need in the society. The requester would write up a profile for the new character and a player could pick it if they liked the description. This would show people that new people are wanted in this society.

 

I wrote up the spawning system. Originally I was going to get random names for parents and store them somewhere, but I find it better if people come up with their own backstory for characters appearing as adults. Children won't be in the first test. I found it surprisingly interesting to spawn test characters and having them land in different locations. The spawn location system is based on preset coordinates with a slight chance of random jitter. There will be so many spawn locations that it's very unlikely anyone will spawn in the same place twice. Right now all the spawn locations are on one island because I don't want to take the risk that testers explore the whole world while still uninhibited by hunger and tiredness. I doubled the AP needed to travel 1 km, so people won't be able to travel 100 km a day anymore. At least if I did my math right.

I will need to figure out how much clicking playing an adult is going to take and how many characters we can afford to have. In the test version, I'm willing to have unlimited characters because in most cases people would only spawn about three before getting bored.

One of my test characters spawned in a forest that has ferns, so I had the idea of implementing a fern bedding. I should make it increase how much AP you get from resting.

Also I didn't go in the details telling about the fire system. Any resource can be set flammable and have an individual burn rate. The fire burns one thing at a time, then moves onto the next thing if it has energy left. If there's nothing flammable left, the fire dies. Also in the beginning it needs tinder and kindling. I've been using wild cotton as tinder and creating shavings through a project from generic hardwood. You also get shavings from making wooden shafts and handles, but not very much. One problem is that currently if you go away and spend 60 AP on another page, the fire will skip the kindling and go straight to the firewood. So that should be addressed in the final version, unless I just skip the kindling altogether and go with just plain tinder.

Originally I was going to allow 20 characters per account, but that was when the game required less user input. Unless we get some sort of a routine system set up, people will have their hands full with just one character. We might also have to shorten how many days are in a month, or how many AP you get per day. Before I doubled the AP needed for traveling, it was possible to acquire all the main Neolithic tools in just 6 days, or 4 if you happen to spawn close to all the necessary resources. A lot of the beginning depends on people acquiring a stone knife, and unless you find basalt, you need two different types of stone, one to knap with and another one that is being knapped. (Because if you hit flint with another piece of flint, you couldn't predict which one of the pieces is going to break.) I know which way to start searching for resources but for someone who hasn't seen the map, it might require a lot of wandering around. A good rule of thumb is that stone is generally found at high lands and near major rivers. But I don't necessarily have to tell testers that. It might be good to have a hunger system even if starvation didn't kill, so that people could report if they managed to keep their characters satiated or if they were starving.

 

Actually, my idea about the NPCs is that they will form so called shadow populations, a non-descriptive mass that populates the same locations as PCs do. So I guess they would only come into play once building huts becomes available. If you have N permanent PC residents, you have N^2 NPCs in the location. You can call individual NPCs out of the masses if you need somebody to work for you, but otherwise they will be represented by a population count and you can't see individuals.

As for forest fires, they might be hard to program. In the background, forest are stores as pngs, so allowing fire to destroy trees would require changing the color of pixels as the fire spreads. I was mainly thinking that you can destroy objects like dead bodies by putting them on a pyre. You need to have enough firewood to allow the body to catch fire before it will burn on its own.

If I made a hunger system, I would have to assign nutritional values to all the edible stuff and that would take time. I was rather thinking that the first step would be saying "You are hungry" when the stomach is empty, and consumed food would be digested at a standard rate. You wouldn't die even if you didn't eat, but it would make you gain less AP through resting, so percent-wise you would have to spend more of your time resting.

I'm going through a dry spell again, although discussing ideas does help. Currently I don't feel much like programming. Before I get started on hunting or farming, I need to have a concise idea of what I'm going to do. Otherwise I might have to end up redoing it later.

 

Since last time, I did the tree felling system. Currently the weight of the felled tree depends on how much you can gather from nature with 10 AP. The weight of the tree is 1000 times that. I might tweak it in the future but it is irrelevant at the moment. The tree type is selected at random from the possible wood types in that spot, but if there are none then it defaults to generic hardwood.

I'm planning to work on the hunting system next. I drew a graph of it on paper yesterday, so I should have a better image of how it works. The current purpose of hunting is to gain access to rawhide, bones, sinew and antlers, other things are not as important. In the future there will be random animals appearing occasionally, and it will be possible to set up traps, but the first stage is to make a system that allows seeking out animals, catching them, killing them and extracting the resources. In the beginning I will only make individual animals, but in the future it will be possible to find packs.

 

I'm hoping that the attack messages would be more colorful and definitely nothing like "You hit the rabbit, causing 10 points of damage." My current system is just texts that are based on the attack type and weight of the animal. Most animals have 2 different attacks, like kick and bite, or kick and trample. Some have just one, and currently there is one unlucky one that has none. It just curls up as a defense maneuver and hopes that the enemy will pity it enough to leave it alone. Currently I don't even have a combat menu, instead I have been testing the functions by calling them with preset input. Currently animal attacks have no variance, so if they don't miss and the animal weight remains the same, the attack efficiency doesn't change. Some attacks have a slight chance of breaking bones that increases as the animal weight does. Currently humans use the same list of attacks as animals do, so they can for example peck the enemy. But my actual idea is that the player will pick an intention out of this list: play, practice, punish, disarm, incapacitate, quick kill, slow death, torture, blind; and it will define which areas are targeted and how hard. Well, you can't disarm an animal unless you literally cut its arm off. I'm trying to build a system that will later work for pvp combat as well. Weapons (and objects that can be used as an improvised weapon) have values like size class, sharpness, blade length, blade width and hands needed to wield. These together with strength and accuracy define the damage caused. It's pretty complicated.

Also instead of HP I have blood. Each creature has 10% of their body weight in blood. (IRL humans have only 7%, but for simplicity's sake I'm using 10% for every creature.) If they lose 20% of that, they go into shock, if they lose 25% or more, they fall unconscious and the risk of dying grows gradually, and 50% is certain death. Blood that has bled into the tissues (bruises) also counts as lost blood. Naturally the more blood you have, the more you have to bleed before you go into shock. But there will be plenty of chances for a critical that causes fatal bleeding, so it's possible to get a one hit kill, especially on the smaller animals. If you get trampled by a 800 kg deer, then you're likely to break a bone. Technically it should break multiple bones but I haven't gotten into that yet. So I should reduce the hit chance of the trample attack, because in most cases it's going to be fatal, and people don't like dying too often. A key point in combat is stay on your feet, because if you fall on the ground, you're usually screwed. And even if you win the combat, it's possible to die later on from untreated wounds.

I would also like to make it so that you don't automatically get close enough to hit an animal, especially the small ones can hide in bushes. I don't want long drawn out combats like in FTO. In my game, it will be possible to make one accurate jab, then step back and wait until the enemy bleeds to death. But you also take the risk that if your abdomen gets pierced with tusks or antlers, you're likely to die of sepsis in a few days.