A few things I'd like to see added to the game. . .

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A few things I'd like to see added to the game. . .

(7 posts) (3 voices)

Started 2 years ago by Street Wolf
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Street Wolf
Member

Just a few things I'd, personally, like to see added into the game.

-The ability to rename player classes, and monster names.

-A couple choices for what players look like. (In options, you could pick to make them look like stickmen, swords, etc)

-A third option added to player classes, called power. (It represents, magic, mana, energy cells, etc. Whatever the MMO is themed in the user's head). It would factor into how strong a class is, but provides an alternative to raw attack.

-Possibly a fourth option labeled Speed (or Agility). Physically makes the player move faster or slower. Maybe it could somehow factor into happiness.

-A generator that lets you choose a different shape for your game world.

I know they aren't really easy things to add, but if development continues on this, it'd be cool to see them in eventually.

Posted 2 years ago #
trevor
admin

A lot of the things you comment on were intentionally left out of the original version of MMORPG Tycoon, as it was written for a "procedural generation" competition, and I felt that letting the player change too much would weaken it as a PG entry. But you're totally right that these things belong in the game, and I'll add them eventually.

I like your "power" suggestion; I'd been trying to work out how to fit magic into the system, and I may just use that in a later version (1.2?). Maybe speed as well, though I don't know of any MMOs which offered speed as a character class trait.

In 1.1 (not yet released), subscribers now are little vector sprites of people (male or female), and monsters are little vector sprites of monsters. This change improved performance, and also makes it look much cooler when you zoom right in to see what your subscribers are doing.

In a later version (probably 1.2?), I'll be allowing players to switch regions between solid ground and water. That'll be very expensive for the player, and take some time, but it'll let you more fully shape the simulated MMO world. :)

Posted 2 years ago #
Street Wolf
Member

Awesome, I look forward to it. :)

Edit: And as for MMO's where speed is a trait, I just meant speed as in that idea of speed and agility, together. So if the user wanted to make a class called Thief, that class might have a high speed, medium attack, and low defense and power.

Posted 2 years ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

The somewhat simple and limiting gameplay makes it a bit boring once you rake in profits and subscribers. I got some ideas while playing it.

I wish you could buy better servers to increase the player limit in zones, create a kind of respawn "area" that's connected to a certain respawn point so low-level players don't respawn in the nearby high-level zone, and be allowed to create more flexible monsters and player-classes, which could be combined with Street Wolf's ideas. Maybe even being able to determine drop rates and items.

It'd also be nice to have a graphics generator. Something where you could draw icons for players, items, weapons, monsters and such. Then there's quests and difficulty of them. It'd require quite a big amount of quests, even for a somewhat small area. This could be solved by managing the overall quest difficulty and such in certain zones and towns. Genres would be a nice addition too. Determining whether it's Sci-Fi, Medieval or Modern day could connect to different groups of people, and would impact subscribers and users.

Disasters. Some people remember the faulty coding in a World of Warcraft patch, that led to an outbreak of a new disease. Disasters ranging from things like that to servers exploding or something as simple as an employee dying, which leads me to another thing. It'd be nice to have employee personalities, like their skill in a certain field combined with their monthly or weekly wage.

A monthly wage would cost more for better employees (they have bills to pay too!), while not costing too much at one moment, whereas a weekly wage would cost less to get better employees, but can really siphon your bank account after a while. Maybe being able to buy better-quality software and hardware which would allow you to expand and define the world more easily and flexibly.

Sorry to kinda steal the spotlight Street Wolf, but it's all about the game right? ;)

Posted 2 years ago #
Street Wolf
Member

No, it's my thread! Augh! Thief! =P

But I do like your ideas. The one thing I'd like to avoid is the idea of picking a hard coded theme (i.e. the game specifically asks you if you want a Sci Fi, Modern Day, or Medieval MMO). I'd rather the user comes up with his own theme for the game.

Posted 2 years ago #
trevor
admin

Upgradable region servers was part of the original vision for the game, but I ended up dropping them because of complexity and for performance reasons (my laptop started having frame rate problems when I had 100 entities in each region.. but I'm now just fine with 300 entities in each, and I suspect I could probably push as high as 500, though I haven't actually tested that). But I've now improved graphic performance enough that that's not really a critical factor any more. I'm still a little nervous about UI complexity, though.

Also in the original spec was to separate out a "dev server" from the live server. The player would specify changes on the dev server, and when the changes were complete the player could upload them onto the live server. The idea was that every time you sent a change to the live server, there was a chance that it'd increase the bug count. In the same way that you had "forum buzz", you'd also have a bug count. You could assign your workers to fixing bugs or to implementing new features, etc. But the whole thing made the UI far more complicated, so I ended up cutting that. I'd still like to do all this stuff, but I don't know how to do it without making the UI utterly impenetrable. I mean, even worse than it already is. :/

Still thinking about it, though.

Graphics are getting a bit of a revamp in 1.1, so I'm going to hold off on any suggestions regarding graphics until after 1.1. :)

Posted 2 years ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

"The one thing I'd like to avoid is the idea of picking a hard coded theme (i.e. the game specifically asks you if you want a Sci Fi, Modern Day, or Medieval MMO). I'd rather the user comes up with his own theme for the game."

Maybe there could be a fourth option that allows the player to simply imagine. I've played a few games by now, and I get confused when I see a swordsman and a robot next to each other.

Also, autosave! :3

Posted 2 years ago #

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