Larger goals

[ColdPrototype]

So, I've been playing for a while now, and fairly recently beat my second overlord. But I haven't played much since, because I've just been feeling a sense of malaise. It seems like the next phase would really be a wash-rinse-repeat sort of thing; once the overlord falls, it's pretty similar to being level 1 again (well, maybe level 20...). I think what this game really needs are some long-term goals to really keep the player moving forward. Something that can interleave with the overlord cycle.

I don't have many thoughts about this just yet, but the first thing that came to mind would be to really add to the sense of purifying the world. Once I knock these guys down, nothing really changes. The monsters spawn same as before, the tiles are the same, etc. It just doesn't feel like I'm really having an effect.

Putting it simply, I can knock over two overlords way faster than I can win AI war. And it feels a lot less satisfying to do so; there just isn't as much of a gradual ascent to a climactic peak.

[x4000]

Yes, you'll get no disagreement on that from us.  There's a metric ton of stuff planned, but it's still quite early beta is really all it boils down to.

Ongoing goals will include (in no particular order, and not limited to this):
1. Finding all the cool spells and exploring all the new regions and areas and such.
2. Improving your settlements citybuilder-style.
3. Accomplishing some character-specific and persona-specific goals.
4. Simply Exploring New Things, as new things become available all the time as you level up (to a limited degree at the moment, but increasingly as we go).


Overlords are the most overt, obvious sort of goal, but they're each a finite thing and not the longest-term goal that would really keep you playing.

[wolfbrother9393]

3. Accomplishing some character-specific and persona-specific goals.

I wanted to suggest emergent storytelling that went along the lines of developing characters within your civilization and maybe even the overlords themselves.

One thing I think would add a lot to the story, the world, and everything, would be adding journals/messages that could randomly generate the content of the message and who it's about. For example, if you're in a region near an overlord maybe you could find writings by him or other people depicting his life/his rise/etc. You could also find the same for characters that lived in your civilization.

Also, talking to the other characters and being able to get to know them (possibly randomly generated backstories) and then be able to take them with you outside your civilization and fight alongside them and possibly create emergent story while you're playing the game. Maybe as you approach a certain house your ai buddy freezes and exclaims "That was my house! That was were my family died!" And if it hasn't been explored then when you explore it messages pop up inside and journal entries detail life in the world before.

I love storytelling in videogames and emergent storytelling can be the most powerful of them all. I would love for you to continue to use this system you've built to develop characters.

So, I hope you guys get this message. This is something I would love to see you do.

-E

[x4000]

Procedurally-generated storytelling is something that we have interest in as well, but there's a limit to what we can really focus on pre-1.0 and I don't think that will be part of it.  But especially if this game really takes off, that's an avenue for extension of the game that really interests us.

[Underfot]

Is it too early to ask about the Hopes and Deeds portion of the game?  I've been coming up with some ideas for how it could work, but I'm really excited to see what's officially planned!

[zebramatt]

I'd like to see some large goats in the game, for sure.

 

[Dizzard]

Is it too early to ask about the Hopes and Deeds portion of the game?  I've been coming up with some ideas for how it could work, but I'm really excited to see what's officially planned!

Hopes and Deeds? What's that about? :S

[x4000]

Well, in a lot of respects the Deeds stuff is already there, it's just not being utilized in very exciting ways.  But the world event log already keeps track of character deads, overlord deaths, etc, and it causes some longer-term effects such as grave plots, morale shifts for characters, and so on.  More stuff is planned with that, but the skeleton of the framework is pretty much there and working.

When it comes to hopes... we'll just have to see if we even do that, in the end.  We had implemented one model back before the private alpha, but it wasn't any fun and so it's been disabled.  I understand Keith has a new concept for it that should be a lot better, but it hasn't hit the prototyping stage yet because there's other stuff that's come up in the meantime that's more immediately interesting and fun.

That's kind of the question here, really: the game tends to evolve in the direction of what is fun and interesting in practice rather than on paper, and lately there's been a lot of growth in directions that we hadn't planned on paper, and most of those are turning out more fun than the prototypes we did before of some of the on-paper stuff.

[wolfbrother9393]

The intro mission was a lot of what I was talking about before.

Integrate more flavor text like what you put into the intro and I think it could add a lot to the whole game!

-E

[x4000]

Glad you like it!  My hope is to have a lot more flavor text like that in general, through NPCs and probably tombstones elsewhere, but even moreso I really want to be able to design and implement linear "missions" into the larger procedural game.  And -- more to the point -- I want players to be able to design them, too.  I think that will be fun all around, and I think that having lots of things of that nature will really enhance the feeling of being in a post-apocalyptic land that is really inhabited by actual people.