Feb 23
Quest Givers
Not much development time tonight. But I did set it up so that you can buy and place quest givers. And I told the procedural model building code how to make a big yellow exclamation point above the quest giver.
Also today, I noticed that I was frequently getting crashes after placing a few buildings and roads. I eventually discovered that the problem was the monsters – they were noticing when they were placed too close to a road, and were registering jobs for developers to move them into better positions. This was old code left over from v1.1, and I was thrilled to see it still working. Well, mostly working. They were registering the position they wanted to be moved to in world-space, whereas everything is now running relative to the region it’s currently in, and so they were giving the developers bad positions to move to. (It’s a bit like telling someone where you are by telling them how far you are from the edges of your map, when you’re looking at world map, and the person you’re talking to is looking at a city map — the positions on the map aren’t going to line up properly!) Once I fixed that problem, they’re working again. Place a road, and developers automatically move any nearby monsters away, to keep the roads relatively safe.
Not bad for code that was originally written back when the game was entirely made of 2D vector graphics.
“Fetch me 25 monster slippers and bring my daughter Becky to the town of Kludaria while killing 5 monsters by hopping on them and if you run more than 5 kilometers in total then you’re banned from the game.”
This game is going to be grate. when about will it be finished? and will we have to pay for it?
This is definitely one of those “It’ll be done when it’s done” projects, particularly since I’m working on it in my spare time. Some days I’ll work on it for several hours after work, and other days (like yesterday), I don’t manage to work on it at all. The first “milestone” of the game (which presents a limited feature set and a cut-down world) shouldn’t be too far away; I estimate that there’s probably about twenty to thirty hours of work left to do to get that ready to go. It’s just a matter of when I’ll get to do those twenty-to-thirty hours of work.
As for whether people will have to pay for it.. I don’t know. The milestone builds will definitely be free to play; I’ll be posting them up on the site, as normal. I keep arguing myself back and forth about the final build; if it’s for-pay, then I’d be able to invest in getting some professional artwork done, some custom music, things of that sort. And hey, if it’d allow me to spend more of my time making stuff like this instead of spending most of my time working for someone else, that can only be a good thing for everyone, right?
But on the other hand, I really like not charging for the games I make; I like that anyone can download and play them, and that I don’t have to think about conversion rates or piracy or spending my time shutting down torrents, or about people being disappointed with their purchase and wanting a refund or etc.
So from a purely practical point of view.. all the upcoming milestones will be free to play. And everyone here (who’s interested to take part) will of course be invited to beta test and will get a free copy of the final game. The final build may or may not be free to everyone as well.. I just haven’t been able to make up my mind about that.
You’d be surprised what you can do with the donation model – Dwarf Fortress dev makes a full living juts from having a donation box up. Or perhaps some special features that can be unlocked with purchase or something – hard to say.
That’s true, though Dwarf Fortress seems to be unusual in its ability to survive entirely based upon donations. But yeah, if something like that can work, that’d be the best of all possible solutions.
However, Dwarf Fortress has a very large and very loyal community. The community here isn’t exactly huge. Still, if MMORPG Tycoon 2 is successful enough to go viral, it could spark a huge burst of people, many of which will likely get loyal enough to spend a bit of money on a donation now and then.
“Or perhaps some special features that can be unlocked with purchase or something”
Oh please no. I always despised games that limited features like that until you pay for it. Battalion: Arena being a prime example. Good game, terrible limitations.
ok thanks.
I heavily doubt that we’ll have to pay for the end product, since version 1 and the betas were all free-to-play.
oh good
allso will the texture of the ground be changeable? like could we make desarts and grass lands?
Right now, the plan is to provide a fair number of different terrain types, and then let the player change the colors and lighting of those terrains. That’s not planned for this first milestone, though; it’ll be sometime later on.
good that will make the game feel more realistic. it was just in all your pictures there is only grass. (I understand that this might be because you haven’t created the textures yet)
PS. im not companing i just want to find out more about the game