Let’s Talk Adventure and Multiplayer

Today, we’re going to take a look at the progress in the adventure mode and the multiplayer mode for a0.7. In alpha 0.6, all a player could do in adventure mode was to build and fight, there weren’t any towns, objectives, dungeons, NPCs, etc. For the next build, we want to be able to add the basics for all of these. The goal is to eventually have a system, probably by a0.8, where players can build the buildings, terrain features, town layout, and dungeons in an editor, upload them to a databank; then when a player wants to generate a world, he can click random and the game will randomly pull buildings, terrain features, and dungeons from the databank and populate the adventure world with them. We also thinking of an editor to let players script missions, but we’re not sure if we can pull that off yet. Below are some screens from our town generation.

Now, that’s just the single/multiplayer adventure part. For versus, we actually have another thing going altogether. We thought for a long time about how to make voxel versus fun. I mean, we said MOBA type games before, but that’s just not very fun since we don’t have heroes or any magic. Regular town defense games are a dime a dozen, so are FPS games. We wanted to make something more unique.

So what makes voxel games different? Well, the building and digging, of course. After a long discussion, here’s what we plan to do. In our multiplayer versus games, players will be divided into teams. When they start out, they get a few flags (we’re just calling the object that, so it’s subjected to change), which they can plant to claim a 64X64 meter of territory. The claim will allow slow resource generation. The goal of the game is to expand territory and gain more points. The administrator can set up the game with a finite time (victory conditions) or no ending at all. So, the player incentive is to produce as many flags as possible, expand territory, and destroy or steal as many enemy flags as possible. That, is the gameplay in a nutshell. Players will probably have to protect flags with walls and turrets, as well as build factories and farms to make better weapons and food. Players can also buy “teleportation cards” to teleport to whichever flag that’s been attacked. Since there should be 8-16 players per team (we don’t know if this will hold), we expect players to do a combination of digging, building, attacking, and defending. Players will be able to import ISOs into the game (there probably will be a limit), as long as they have enough materials, they can be replicated; so we might see some tank wars and air battles.

We don’t really know if this is fun or not, it’s like a 3D version of Clash of Clans mixed with a long game of Civilization and then some Battlefield sprinkled in, in 3rd person. But we shall find out!