{"id":179,"date":"2008-06-26T21:02:49","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T11:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=179"},"modified":"2008-06-26T21:02:49","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T11:02:49","slug":"mmorpg-tycoon-development-timeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2008\/06\/26\/mmorpg-tycoon-development-timeline\/","title":{"rendered":"MMORPG Tycoon development timeline"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So now that the PCG competition is over, it&#8217;s time to consider future directions for MMORPG Tycoon.\u00a0 Development will be slowish, of course, as it&#8217;s really a side project for me.\u00a0 And I do expect to continue to do occasional &#8220;Game in a Week&#8221;s, just to stay fresh.<\/p>\n<p>But on MMORPG Tycoon, I have a pretty good idea of what I&#8217;ll implement for version 1.1.<\/p>\n<p>More beneath the fold.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->My rough list of what I&#8217;m planning to implement for version 1.1:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Improved subscribed user simulation.\u00a0 In addition to what they do now, subscribed users will also form bonds with each other, including friendships\/enmity, will form parties to adventure together, and will form guilds.\u00a0 Users will have inventories, including weapons, armour, healing items, and money.\u00a0 Monster drops will provide these, as will shops in town.\u00a0 Users will remember which bits of the world they have been to before, and will be happy to explore new areas, or become bored if they spend too long in just one place.<\/li>\n<li>Revamped city building.\u00a0 Instead of placing a single &#8220;town&#8221; icon as the player does now, the player will place individual buildings.\u00a0 The full list of buildings will be:\u00a0 Tavern (resting, socialising, &#8216;home&#8217;), Shoppe (kitting up, selling loot), Auction House (selling\/buying loot, maybe crafting?), Trainers (must be visited after gaining a level), and Quest-Givers.<\/li>\n<li>The new quest givers will work a little like towns do now;\u00a0 the quest-giver will automatically select a nearby region for the user to travel to and perform some task.\u00a0 Unlike before, though, each quest-giver has a finite number of quests.\u00a0 When a player finishes performing quests for one quest-giver, he&#8217;ll have to find another quest-giver, or else grind levels until he&#8217;s high enough level to reach another quest-giver.\u00a0 And users don&#8217;t like grinding levels, so players will have to be sure they have enough quest-givers to provide experience.\u00a0 Additionally, the player will be able to place a &#8220;boss monster&#8221; for each quest-givers&#8217; final mission.\u00a0 Users will have to defeat that boss monster in order to clear the last quest.<\/li>\n<li>Revamped road placement.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know how this will work yet, but I&#8217;m not happy with the current system.\u00a0 1.1 will have much nicer roads than the current ones;\u00a0 I&#8217;m just not sure how they&#8217;ll work, yet.<\/li>\n<li>Number of employees will actually be wired up into the MMORPG simulation.\u00a0 When the player places city buildings or roads, it will take time for those buildings to actually be built.\u00a0 Employees will appear on the map, busily moving around fulfilling the player&#8217;s build orders.\u00a0 The more employees you have, the faster your build orders will be fulfilled.\u00a0 But also the more you have to pay in wages.<\/li>\n<li>A real business economy will actually be wired up;\u00a0 placing buildings will now cost cash, in addition to employee wages.\u00a0 This will make the whole &#8220;paying off the initial loan&#8221; situation much less pointless.<\/li>\n<li>The player will be able to zone\/unzone water regions.\u00a0 At a very high price.<\/li>\n<li>A &#8220;Favorite Users&#8221; report, which will show you the activities of your favourite subscribed users.\u00a0 No need to sit on the &#8220;Inspect&#8221; tool all day long;\u00a0 this will give you a digest form of what they&#8217;ve been up to during the last 24 hours!<\/li>\n<li>Raising the subscriber cap to at least as high as the largest competitor MMORPG.\u00a0 Ideally somewhere around 2 million users.<\/li>\n<li>A step-by-step in-game tutorial mode that&#8217;ll teach all the basics of the game.<\/li>\n<li>Some sort of terrain on the map.\u00a0 Probably mountain ranges and forests.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overally, the main notable thing that I don&#8217;t plan to change in 1.1 is the &#8220;maximum number of users per region&#8221; restriction.\u00a0 That is actually one of the core gameplay challenges of MMORPG Tycoon;\u00a0 how to keep your users happy, while strategically arranging your buildings and zones to keep from letting your users bunch up together in just a single server.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I don&#8217;t know when 1.1 will be finished;\u00a0 as you can tell from the task list above, it&#8217;s a really big job, and I&#8217;m just doing this for free in my spare time, but I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll put up a beta build from time to time to get people to try out the various gameplay concepts.\u00a0 :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So now that the PCG competition is over, it&#8217;s time to consider future directions for MMORPG Tycoon.\u00a0 Development will be slowish, of course, as it&#8217;s really a side project for me.\u00a0 And I do expect to continue to do occasional &#8220;Game in a Week&#8221;s, just to stay fresh. But on MMORPG Tycoon, I have a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[24,25],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-2T","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}