On Tue, May 29, 2007 10:27 pm, Ethan Glasser-Camp wrote: > I can't play your demo because I'm running Linux. But I like games > where you can explore and discover things. I'm not sure procedurally > generating them is the way to go, though. It reminds me of Daggerfall, > which was sort of fun, but dungeon crawls could take days of real time > with little to no rewards.
Oops. When I've got battery power and a proper Net connection I'll send the source. Nothing worth keeping proprietary here. 8) I found Daggerfall's dungeons dull because they were all the same. I once argued (at <www.rpgamer.com/editor/2001/q3/070601ks.html>) that random dungeons are boring because they're repetitive, there's no overall organization (like a central gadget the dungeon is built around), and there's no ability to share specific information with other players. Doing procedural generation does solve problem 3, but I'm not sure about 1 and 2. In the awesome game Disgaea, I actually liked the random dungeons because there were significant layout variations, and several different things to do there. For an island theme and problem 1 and 2, one option would be to have several _types_ of dungeon: caves, shipwrecks, underwater reefs etc.. On Tue, May 29, 2007 10:41 pm, Laura Creighton wrote: > One thing that has worked when you have built a lot of nice > world to explore, but no particular reason for gamers to _want_ to explore > it, is to build some sort of commerce system when you earn > gold/credits/conch shells for transporting things from places where they > are common to places where they are rare. > > Then you need to build something useful to spend your gold/credits/conch > shells on. Better boats springs to mind, but of course the possibilities > are endless. > > > Laura's .02 euros Whoa, those are relatively valuable thoughts! Commerce is a good idea. I've been wondering about how to have some kind of larger-scale organization to the world, though. My "zones" represent 1 km^2 areas, and they're generated randomly relatively to each other. So it's fairly likely that if I did the commerce system now, Shiny Widgets might cost 1 conch on one island and 100 on the next island over. If I had some kind of larger-scale arrangement of islands (which would also get me away from the grid seen at <http://kschnee.xepher.net/pics/061025skygold2.jpg> but open up dull ocean areas), I could say that Shiny Widgets are cheap throughout a large region. I released a "sailing demo" earlier. Depending on the ship's scale relative to the graphics, sailing around with progressively cooler ships could be fun. Quick question before this battery runs out: what would you want to be able to do in a village in this primitive island world, if the village is abstracted as a menu but the individual random tribesmen have names and hopefully some kind of individual personality? What mechanics? Kris
