Otherworld - a game I'm working on

Yeah, the release was delayed because I didn't want to put in a half-finished product. Also, the main reason people were looking forward to the hunting system was that they could have access to hide and bones, so there's no sense in releasing it until I have implemented the mechanic to extract said parts from an animal carcass.

Cantr has one hit per opponent per day setup, and it's too slow. One idea would be that when you engage in combat, you can auto-fight against the other player's settings but if you run away, you won't be allowed to try again until 16/20/24 hours have passed or the other player has logged in. This would prevent people from benefiting from being able to apply first aid on themselves while the other player would be unable to do so automatically. There won't be no insta-healing items. If you get a wound, you can put stitches on it to stop it from bleeding, but the wound will still be there and if you get hit in the same body part again, then it should rip the wound open.

Also I would always want dying characters to be able to say their last words unless their death is very sudden, like a severed carotid artery. If a character auto-surrenders, other players will be blocked from executing him until a set time has passed or the player has logged in to acknowledge what happened.

Another idea: Characters who surrender in battle can be taken as slaves, and if the player of the victim doesn't want to play a slave, they can convert their character into an NPC, who will be strictly loyal to his captor. I'm sort of excited about the potential of slave trade in the game.

Are you familiar with PHP? If so, I could PM you my fight-related functions and you could see how it currently works.

 

I was working on the dressing carcasses code. I only finished it yesterday. It's possible there might be bugs. Also, last night I started thinking that if I remember correctly, deer weigh 800 kilos when they should only be 80. I need to fix that later. In the future there will be about 10 different combat styles. Also in the future, it's actually going to limit your actions if you have a broken arm or a leg. Currently it's only a message + internal bleeding.

 

Martial arts in itself isn't an attack style but if you attack barehanded, you can still attempt to cripple or quick kill or something else in the future. Currently you can't target specific body parts on purpose, but I might allow it in the future. I didn't want to go into a system where a person must choose a precise target each round because that doesn't work well with automated combat. Unless you could make a rule for yourself that if your opponent is crippled, you will target the crippled limb with aim to cause pain and hopefully drive the person into surrendering. Quick kill targets major arteries, the heart and the brain. Cripple targets critical tendons.

 

I'm again at a stage where I don't feel like working on this project. The things I would need to work on next are: processing hides into leather (or even rawhide), adding a healing system with some sort of bandages, maybe also the possibility of applying stitches, and the functionality that some projects process automatically as long as there is an ongoing fire or fresh water present. So when ever someone checks the project status, it needs to calculate if there is enough firewood to last until the moment of checking, and if not, what time does the fire go out and how much progress was made up until that point. Also multiple items can be cooked or baked in the same oven/kiln at the same time, so if you calculate the time the fire goes out, next you need to check progress for each item inside the kiln. Also it should lock the items being baked so that they cannot be extracted while the fire is ongoing. I need to finish the thought process before I start coding it. I don't remember if I mentioned, but certain objects should have an expiry time and they can be manipulated before that time is due, but they become invisible to people who have passed that time on their timelines. I think technically instead of destroying firewood when a check is done, I should set its expiry time instead. If somebody puts out a fire, it should calculate how much has been consumed by that point and then turn the expiry time into 0 after removing the material that has been burned. If someone adds extra firewood into the same pile, it should extend the expiry time.

 

I don't have a picture yet. I've been using the leaf logo but it's pretty tiny. I can design something but it probably won't happen in an instant. I need to think of the key aspects and choose components that reflect those things.

I've been working on fixing fire projects so that it no longer gets messed up if someone in the future views it. I realized my firewood requirements were unrealistic. According to my studies, if a person has a very good hearth that reserves heat, they can heat a house with 10 kg a day, whereas if they have an open fireplace that doesn't reserve heat, they need 20 kg. I need to bear in mind that a game day is 12 hours, not 24. Originally an open fire was consuming 12 kg of wood an hour, but I have reduced it to 1.2 kg instead. I can always tweak it later on. In the future, I would want some types of wood to be more optimal than others, but most of my woods are fruit wood. I've started thinking, is there really a point in including marginal plants such as rambutan? I should rather be concentrating on the ancestors of commercial crops, and also common crafting woods such as ash and hickory. But since I've already made availability maps for everything, there's no point in removing certain fruits anymore. It's important that all warm regions have access to some fruit, and they are localized. On one island, it might be the rambutan that is most common, whereas on another it might be the banana or something else. Because there won't be refrigerated shipping containers, the only way to get foreign fruits on a new island is to plant them there, and it requires the right kind of climate.

I also added some functions regarding change projects, so when I finally get around to programming the whole system, part of it will be done already. I've found it a good method to break things into smaller functions if the whole idea feels too complicated to handle. When I was working on the combat system, at first I wrote a function that just produced descriptions of attacks, and animal attack strength depended on its weight. I learned that if there is no variation, it will always repeat the same text per animal and get boring very quickly. Overall, even though an animal generally attacks at a uniform strength, the body part targeted is what defines how much damage it does. If you get bitten in the hand, the teeth will percentage-wise pierce deeper than if it bites you in the thigh. In the other hand, if it hits the femoral artery, you can die in seconds.

My thought about healing is that while a person is engaged in combat, their wounds shouldn't stop bleeding because the person is in motion constantly, so it's increasing blood flow, and overall combat happens generally fast, so there is no time for the wounds to start closing. But when a person is at rest, small wounds will close without attendance, and large wounds will also start closing if you hold them shut or apply stitches. Level 10 bleed (and possibly 9 as well) is always fatal and cannot be stopped. However this requires the enemy to hit a very small target. Currently animal attacks have a large random variance, but in the future I'm going to divide animals into accuracy categories. Some animals like wolves and hawks will be very precise in their attacks. Many small animals don't even try to kill you, they just bite as a defense mechanism.

It doesn't seem I'm going to get any help currently, short of some feedback from testers, but it might be useful to put a list of plans on the website so that people can see what has been implemented and what's up next.

 

This is what I came up with. It's a bit of a hodge-podge but I'm happy with it. It has some things we have on the test region (tapirs, rambutans, mushrooms) and other things that I wish I had in the game but don't have yet (baskets, pottery, processing animal skins).

 

Once it has enough key features implemented. I'm accepting testers but from what I've observed in their behavior, they generally play actively for one day, then run out of stuff to do, so currently the game isn't complex enough to keep up interest. I'm going to add a list of features implemented and what's up next so that people can see what to expect.

 

One more thing, I'm speeding up the aging so that characters reach maturity at 14. They will continue to gain weight and grow taller until the age of 20, but otherwise they will be capable of everything adults generally are and look like shorter adults. I'm assuming most people can't remain interested in playing the child stage for long, so at maximum it's 156 days (real time). If someone wants less than that, they can start playing in the middle. The first year after birth is automated. The earliest a player can take over a character is at 1 year old. They are allowed to know simple words at that point, and at 2 years old, they are allowed to use full sentences. Child characters will start being somewhat useful on projects starting from year 6, up to that point they are mainly there for social aspects. Starting from year 10, a character can potentially survive on their own but it's still wise to remain in a group until the age of 14.

Age:

0 - baby
1-3 - toddler
4-9 - child
10-13 - older child
14-19 - young adult
20-29 - grown adult
30-39 - middle-aged adult
40-49 - mature adult
50-69 - senior adult
70+ - old

 

It's a bit silly that people can already vote before the game is even open to the public. As far as I know, you have never created a test character even though I made an account for you. You could see for yourself what the inside looks like.

I've started making a new map, so that once the testing stage is completely finished, the actual game will start with a new world and testers won't have an advantage from knowing the geography. In a way I would want to have even more wood types, but then I would have to rework how resources work. It would make more sense if you could combine qualities like hardness/softness, color, grain, density, workability, resin and such. In the optimal situation, it could create endless new resources with different combinations. But how to make such a mechanic? Long ago I had an idea that different regions would have dozens of different types of trees, and they would be classified by leaf shape and such.

 

I don't want it to be random, but my current idea is to allow generating new species of plants when you explore locations, so there will always be a chance to find something new. Some plants will be more optimal than others and can be selected for crossbreeding to pass on their good genes. Areas will have a certain pool of attributes it can combine into mutations, and my hope is there can be dozens or even hundreds of tree types per location. But this is going to require a new way of storing resource types and applying them for projects. Resources will have attributes like carving hardness that defines which tools they can be worked with. Also if I start allowing generating berries and fruit with random variation, they will have traits like color, size, sweetness, acid, peel type and such.

The game has a page that lists what has been implemented and what's being planned for the future. It can be accessed via a link from the main page.

 

Currently when someone unlocks an area, it will be unlocked for all. It might not technically make sense but it encourages teamwork.