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Topic: Crypto Kingdom - 1991 Retro Virtual World(City) - page 246. (Read 632671 times)

legendary
Activity: 1834
Merit: 1019
Looking forward to building a town, then city, then world...



I always did prefer winning by building the spaceship in Civ, to me it was a much more enrichening experience Smiley
hero member
Activity: 722
Merit: 500
Looking forward to building a town, then city, then world...



Ambitious. I might try a music bar - a virtual Marquee or the Fillmore Inside.
member
Activity: 94
Merit: 10
Excellent idea!

Have you considered developing in Unity? (http://unity3d.com/). It's one of the most popular multi-platform game engines now. It's usable for 2D as well and one code will work everywhere including browsers, desktop, facebook and mobile devices. Other popular choice around professionals now is LibGDX (http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/features.html)

But anyway you will need some server programming as well. Such games are always front-end (any engine like these or just html5) + back-end (server side, where all DBs are kept).

3 weeks sounds too much optimistic for the first real alpha version even with minimal functionality. Such projects always take more time than we think in the beginning.

It's very important for the developers to plan all future architecture in advance before actual programming. Otherwise you will build a house without a basement and after that will need to repair and repair it each time when adding new functionality.

Other popular conception is to build a simple prototype. Three weeks look real for it. Test it for playability and after that plan and build a new concrete basement for the real game. If there are enough people in a team both tasks can go simultaneously.

I wish you success with such a great project and will be happy to beta test.
donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036
A three week turnaround for coding all these ideas sounds pretty quick, how many people do you have working on this?

Am I right in saying there will almost be two games in this, a MMO game of civ that collectively all players play and then a meta game of managing the specific plot of land that you own?

Regarding theme, your game is called crypto kingdom, shouldn't there be more made of the the fact it is funded by a crypto currency. Because at the moment it's the equivalent of naming your game "Sid Miers Fiat World" just because of the way you buy the game.

If you want to increase the theme, you could add Millie farms into the game, or ask players to crack simple maths problems to access certain areas, or if you want to really push the envelope you could add a evil banking cartel to the game as a sort of antagonist.

Would you consider a way of tipping the owners of a house  with Millies if it is offering a good service to the community?


For coding all, certainly 3 weeks is not enough, except perhaps from a fully thought-out spex (developing of which takes a long time). For coding the initial features, 3 weeks is enough.

The facets of the game will be:

- Online MMORPG of interacting with other people via trollboxes, going to stores to conduct exchange, etc. The content will be largely developed by the players themselves.

- Resource management aspect of keeping your character in good shape. It is possible to participate in MMORPG as a "stranger" for free, and as "visiting merchant"/"visiting noble" against a fee. Ingame, you can also engage in industry and make your character raise in the levels, which makes upkeep higher but opens up new opportunities also. Then you can be a noble who owns so much land that he can play with his peers and earn $50 per month actual income (for example). Another one does not care about resource management and has to constantly fund the account to retain his lifestyle. Just like in real world.

- Civ-style aspect comes in both the city map (latest thought - consisting of 10x15 plot pages that can be accessed in a mobile screen), and the country map (consisting of farmland that has a certain production per plot). In the city, players compete for the location of taverns, pharmacies and other places that the characters must visit, in the countryside the grand scheme of things is constructing roads that the goods can flow to the city when it grows bigger and more food is needed. Therefore the Duchies far away are entirely speculative, and near the city they are very valuable productive assets.

There will be plenty of aspects that tie the game up with cryptotheme, for example the bot-weeding procedure of asking a character to visit a certain registry office, where Monero-goodnews is preached, also giveaways will be plentiful. The game is not intended to make money but to increase knowledge about Monero and its use.

A new type of social network will also be introduced for making ingame friends and communicating with them.

Tipping is enabled in every level.
legendary
Activity: 1834
Merit: 1019
many have lots to learn from a Game like this Wink

Godspeed, good sirs!
donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036

Also, freeciv is a open sauce project that could be incorporated somehow?

if this ends up incorporating civ-like features that would be awesome! Smiley

The first version that we use for lifting up Monero from the abyss needs to get out asap. As well as Civilization, whose 6th incarnation is soon coming, this can be revised and new features added, or add the features to the old design if possible.

What I say now will probably not be the v1, but will show the extent of my current design (quite CIV-like don't you think Smiley ) :

- Gameworld has capacity for 100,000 players under one King, also 1 million serfs will be there, non-playable but as workforce to be contracted;

- In the center there is the city, composed of 500x500 plots that can be used to build buildings. Buildings contain all features, businesses, warehouses and of course residences. A small building "hut" takes up 1 lot, a large one "Malla castle" takes 27 lots + park. One rental block can accommodate 12 people in one space, likewise there is no limit how many spacious palaces one person can own without using them. ("City view" in CIV1 although much enhanced because every building is functional! Looks like the "Main map" a bit). The city will be opened piecewise, in 25 arrondissements, to make sure that the buildings are reasonably close to each other and it works nicely from a casual player's pov who always starts journeys from the main square (residents start from their home);

- The countryside consists of different size farms and estates ("Global map"), new Earldoms will be opened when there are enough funds to build a road to them (for goods transport to the city), so that there is about as many square kilometres of land as there are players, until all land is taken. This land is capable to support not only the serfs but also the city dwellers. The land owners receive all the various goods automatically to their city warehouses with some possibility to tailor and develop the production ("City mgmt view" in CIV1);

- Both the plots in the city and the provinces in the countryside offer speculation opportunities. The Earldoms (1000 sq.km of land - huge resources since there is only 1 sq.km per player on average) may be able to be bought for cheap in the early stages of the game (for the title Wink ), but their value only comes later when the road is constructed, and it is not economically sensible until the city is big enough so that the new products coming to the market would not crash prices;

- The player need not care about anything until he gets to a higher level, it is "type URL and GO" -game.

- In the higher level the player is asked of his age (20-50) and gender. The game time progresses 24:1 to the normal time, so one character can only live typically a year of real life time, or a little more. Before dying, characters always become sick so they have the opportunity to move the lands, titles and good to the new character;

- The sustenance of a character is residence (buy or rent, maintain), food (visit taverns, autovisit when not online), drink (same), clothes (buy from tailors, then they wear down and must be replaced), driver (only peasants walk), servants (if you have a large house). This happens in "character maintenance view" which is also your profile page so that everyone can see if you actually eat Foie Gras every day like you boast to) Once you get to higher level of play, the social requirements of living standard go higher, so that people declining becoming Duke "for financial reasons" under Churchill becomes understandable Wink ;

- The income for Nobles is the resources their lands produce, the others receive profits from actual business conducted within the game world, also virtual businesses (Caviar expedition), then there is a selector: "Spend time on" which determined how to spend the majority of character time which is not spent online. The options include several "work pools" which means that all money spent in the city towards a certain kind of work is divided to people doing it. Higher "skill" in something gives you a bigger dividend;

- To make ends meet, it is possible to eat and drink more cheaply, but that also makes you die younger. The staple drink, "mead", is actually no mead at all, it is distilled from potato peelings (the staple food for poor being potatoes) and then diluted with whatever water is available. It tastes between "almost nothing" to "disgustingly horrible", combining the long term dangers of bad alcohol and bad water, but neutralising the immediate concerns of infectious disease. It is the greatest disgrace of the city's living conditions to not have any potable non-alcoholic drinks available. Luckily both beer and wine can be had, and "you know that you have reached true financial indepencence when you never will touch that shit again". Most people remember their last encounter with mead, that being a planned event.
donator
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1036
Do you have a design team working on this game already, if someone would like to join what kind of vacancies are available?

The team is currently not formed. I would be the "lead designer" (the "Sid Meier").

Even though it is no public knowledge, I have been designing games for over 25 years, mainly board/card/math games, and mainly for the joy of designing. I am very capable of designing the economic engine of the game. On the other hand, I know nothing about programming so some people will certainly be needed. There is also a project manager whose name is currently not public. I will answer the questions as much as I can.


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What code are you planning to use to run this bad boy? HTML5 or something like C# so it can be easily ported to app in future. The reason I say this is that I feel apps are best for social interactions as they allow players to be highly mobile and not stuck at a PC while playing.

The idea is to allow for mobile playing.

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Will it be a 2d map that allowed players to enter 3d rooms or will it be all 2d?

I am thinking the structure at least would be 2d. Perhaps 3d does not fit the style at all. I'd like to think of it as "demoscene" type game where you have to excel within the heavy limitations, so that every pixel counts.

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I fear that your plan of offering in game money for time spent playing encourages bots and multi accounts to harvest gold. Instead have you considered a way of offering the players regular tasks to earn gold in the same way Moshi Monsters offers players simple Maths and English in exchange for their ingame currency.

I plan to implement an algorithm that spots the accounts that are played by bots and reduces their income to a minimum. Also an inactive account in a higher level will soon start to run a deficit due to lack of intelligent maintenance, keeping the bots from earning meaningful amounts.


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Have you already mocked up this game in Excel? Is it functional or did you just do the hard math in it?

Initial mockup is done. Now I am trying to make a resource-based economic system which would be easy enough to implement without the feature creep postponing the project till 2016. Newbies would just explore the world without needing to care about clothing themselves. The economy would start to apply to the player stepwise from level 3 onwards (initially 10 levels).

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What is the contingency for you being rendered unable to play the game by any means, this means that all the gold / XMR will be held by you and no one will be able to finance the development anymore.

The King has so many business going on that his account will be played by multiple players. Also the Town Council (that manages the game world) is a separate entity.

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What is your preferred method of allowing new players (who understand that the XMR invested in this game is dead money) to purchase XMR, will there be a link to a XMR exchange or will you have your own USD / XMR website nearby where players can quickly convert?

I have several ideas, but this will be left to individual players to decide mostly. They have their shoprooms, linkspace, adspace etc.
sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 250
Sound Engineer for Hire
Sounds great Smiley
Hit me a PM when a test copy is out, I'd love to test it and make a high quality review about it Smiley
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1015
Also, freeciv is a open sauce project that could be incorporated somehow?
Freeciv's almost entirely in C which'd be very difficult for this game to be coded in, I imagine. Probably nothing can be taken unless there's some way to convert some of Freeciv's assets to whatever this is written in.
legendary
Activity: 826
Merit: 1000
amarha

Also, freeciv is a open sauce project that could be incorporated somehow?

if this ends up incorporating civ-like features that would be awesome! Smiley
legendary
Activity: 826
Merit: 1000
amarha

I fear that your plan of offering in game money for time spent playing encourages bots and multi accounts to harvest gold. Instead have you considered a way of offering the players regular tasks to earn gold in the same way Moshi Monsters offers players simple Maths and English in exchange for their ingame currency.


Perhaps to mitigate bots and such the distribution of currency can be linked to their in game reputation system. Since it's a primarily social game from the sounds of it I think bots will have a hard time interacting with real humans.
newbie
Activity: 56
Merit: 0
Hello,

First of all sorry for all the questions I am about to ask and also sorry if they don't make sense, I am writing this as things come out of my head so let me know if you need me to clarify anything.

This is a fantastic idea. Weirdly I have also been playing around with the idea of using a crypto currency to boost the economy of a real MMO game, only my idea was that the clients would have some mining functionality with the proceeds given to charity.

Now onto the questions, these are in no particular order:

Do you have a design team working on this game already, if someone would like to join what kind of vacancies are available?

What code are you planning to use to run this bad boy? HTML5 or something like C# so it can be easily ported to app in future. The reason I say this is that I feel apps are best for social interactions as they allow players to be highly mobile and not stuck at a PC while playing.

Will it be a 2d map that allowed players to enter 3d rooms or will it be all 2d?

This sounds very like Second Life in style, only with a different graphical style. Without sounding condescending, have you tried the Moshi Monsters game created by Mind Candy, that also appears to be very similar. Alternatively a heavily modded version of Minecraft could potentially support some of your features (but it would not be playable in browser).

I fear that your plan of offering in game money for time spent playing encourages bots and multi accounts to harvest gold. Instead have you considered a way of offering the players regular tasks to earn gold in the same way Moshi Monsters offers players simple Maths and English in exchange for their ingame currency.

I hope it was you who recently registered cryptokingdom.com otherwise it might cost you a pretty penny to buy it now.

Have you already mocked up this game in Excel? Is it functional or did you just do the hard math in it?

What is the contingency for you being rendered unable to play the game by any means, this means that all the gold / XMR will be held by you and no one will be able to finance the development anymore.

What is your preferred method of allowing new players (who understand that the XMR invested in this game is dead money) to purchase XMR, will there be a link to a XMR exchange or will you have your own USD / XMR website nearby where players can quickly convert?
newbie
Activity: 41
Merit: 0
will make sure to try it when it's ready.  Smiley
legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1000
Want privacy? Use Monero!
Very good idea!

If you want people to donate more to the devs, you could also tie a MEW specific reward in Gold. For example 50 XMR MEW membership = 500 Gold.
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
Crypto Kingdom


Gameworld

similar look to the main map of Civilization 1 from 1991.

Oh man, Civilization 1.. my first PC game ever! Still play it on DOSbox from time to time, still just as good. Thanks for making me nostalgia hard! Were you a player back in the day?
legendary
Activity: 1204
Merit: 1002
Gresham's Lawyer
The big question that I am sure is on everyone's mind...  how to secure a place in the first 500 gamers to get in on the 1000 gold for 100 XMR deal?
hero member
Activity: 574
Merit: 500
Definitely interesting. If it works I'll be impressed.
legendary
Activity: 2142
Merit: 1131
 
This is what I call a damn good idea.

I can't wait to beta test it.
legendary
Activity: 1204
Merit: 1002
Gresham's Lawyer
This sounded interesting until "I, as the king"..
By putting yourself in this position I think that you hurt Monero more than you help.
I believe many people don't want to touch Monero because of your vocal involvement, and this will only aggravate the problem.

LOL, everyone knows the lower classes have all the fun and freedom. Grin
The King has to stay pompous and above it all, while the peasants get to boogie out.
It isn't like they actually have to work or anything.
Because...
Its a game, its only a game, don't make it seem like it is something serious enough to get upset about.
Save the emotions for real things.
legendary
Activity: 3934
Merit: 1248
Owner at AltQuick.com
Looks cool.
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