I'm also someone that just became a fan of the company, thought I haven't gotten around to buying AI War yet. I'm just very impressed with the level of support you've given that game over the past two years which greatly increases my interest in it.You might to promote a little more on social networking sites, I noticed the company only has like 4 fans and I was the 4th.
Many thanks for the kind words, and welcome to the forums! In terms of Facebook, I'm really not sure how to promote there aside from advertising with them. And advertising with them has been a profound waste of money in the past.
I'm not really sure what other techniques folks use.
I think AVWW has pretty good potential to be a breakout hit at least as large as AI War and maybe larger since since procedurally-generated sandbox worlds seem to be on the verge of becoming their own genre with Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress becoming Cult Classics, and that Terraria game coming out soon. A lot of the complaints I see about those games are the slow pace of updates, or that the updates don't affect gameplay much in the case of DF.
Can't argue with much of that, though the idea that Minecraft is a cult classic makes me laugh a bit. With 2 million copies sold and counting, there's nothing cult about that game!
I do have a question or two though, how do you plan to avoid falling into the Oblivion trap? In the places where I hang out, Morrowind is very highly regarded and Oblivion isn't thought of nearly as well, with a common sentiment being that you need to install tons of mods to make it fun. A lot of people attribute this to Morrowind having a ton of little handcrafted little interesting places, whereas Oblivion was more procedurally generated or at least cut and pasted areas. I quickly lost interest in exploring the 'dungeons' in Oblivion when I found out most of them had the same layout, the same monsters, and the same loot. I guess I'm kinda worried about that happening here with the civilization level sounding somewhat like the level scaling.
Having never played Morrowind or Obliviion, I can't speak to those specific examples. But I certainly get what you're driving at. I have played Fallout 3, and a fair bit of Fallout 2, and I felt the same sort of difference there. I've written about the answers to all these questions at length other places, but to answer them again in brief: I think the biggest challenge facing Fallout 3 and Obliviion was that they were huge worlds in 3D. Every asset in those games had to be hand crafted, and that takes a long time per asset. With a 2D game like AVWW, the biggest strength of the 2D is that creating new assets is incredibly cheap and quick.
Check out what I've written about chunk scripting, etc, elswhere for the longer-form answer. The game itself will be supporting player-created scripts for randomized stuff, and we'll be wrapping many of those back into the game itself, as well as creating more of them ourselves. Is there a point after which you'll start seeing repetition? Of
course. That's just unavoidable with any game, procedural or no. What procedural techniques allow is for greatly extending the world beyond the hand-crafting capabilities of the staff. In the case of 2D, it works much better than in 3D. If this is anywhere popular like AI War, we'll be able to do a ton of post release free DLC and paid expansions that will keep this growing for years.
I don't think civilization level is what you think it is; it's like your character level in other games, but applied to all characters in multiplayer, and all NPCs. It's more to do with perma-death. There IS some level scaling (the world increases at 33% of the rate that you do), but that's simply to keep the older areas from becoming completely stale. You'll still kick major butt in them when you go back there.
Are there going to be out-of-depth style areas? A game with a uniformly dangerous world isn't as interesting as one where you can luck upon a powerful item early or stumble into the wrong area and die. Obviously those things can't happen too often, but in the right amounts they provide significant spice. A game world based on the real world isn't necessarily fun, but it seems more 'real' to think that really bad or good things can happen no matter where you are, and that helps a game become more interesting.
You'll want to check out some of the stuff about regions, etc -- the game is full of different levels of difficulties, and you can set your own pace through them. There's no lucking into powerful items early, but if you want to accept the risks of a more dangerous region in return for a more powerful item, you can at any time; it's about daring, not luck, to get powerful stuff early.
When you say in the promotional material that you only need to generate one world, how does that work? Does the game generate more areas than it's feasible to explore, or does it generate additional areas when you've explored most of them, or what? Only generating one world and playing it for as long as I'm still interested in playing the game sounds questionable to me, like it would eventually get boring and that I'd want to generate a different world with different characteristics after a few weeks. If you look at something like Dwarf Fortress, I don't think people keep playing the same fortress for very long periods of time even though there's a lot of randomness and detail. Maybe I'd get bored with the default world after a few weeks and want to play a desert world, or a low tech world, or a high magic world, or whatever.
The world is generate-as-you-go. So when you first go into the world, it's very tiny, only maybe 40 tiles, of which you can see 9. As you explore around, the world generates around you. This is familiar to anyone who knows Minecraft. Like in Minecraft, there's no reason to start a new world because any new features added to the game become available in existing worlds. Just explore beyond the boundaries you've found so far, and the new stuff starts showing up. The DF comparsion isn't very apt, because the world there is pregenerated at a fixed size, and your fortress is all in one place. Here it's all about exploration, not staying still. There's a number of interviews and such where I went into this in a lot greater depth.
Lastly, what does the largest settlement size look like, roughly?
Settlements take up an entire region tile from the overworld map at this point, so they are the same size as any other region. In terms of the number of characters in them, that we're still figuring out in terms of deciding what feels best. My guess is that most will be pretty small, though of course you can pack them with more NPCs that you meet and invite there. Lots and lots of room!
