Bay 12 Games Forum

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Its appearance must fall within the 'theme' of the game.

I’ve seen this both on the $100 and $1,000 pledge level.  Given you’re doing a fantasy MMORPG with magic, what level of technology are you stopping at?  You’ve mentioned traps and piracy on your Kickstarter page so will you be including gunpowder and cannons or stopping short of those items?  Is there anything your team is ruling out?

On the custom race pledge, what system do you have in place for race balancing?  Certain races and creatures come with natural abilities, like spiders with webbing and scorpions with venomous stingers.  Will natural abilities be balanced out with decreased stats or limits on items/magic?  You’ve also mentioned a tiered system for race unlocks on your site but I forgot where.  As new races are added will they be worked into that tiered system? 

Will your magic system also include spells with charm/mind control elements that one could use to affect a player’s hirelings or allied/neutral creatures?  Turning an enemy’s invested influence against them with magic would be an interesting way of countering influence pooling, potentially turning outmatched battles into more manageable skirmishes.

If we get ships and piracy, we'll have cannons. We have some plans for steamwork type things, so something along those lines.

On races, obviously we'll balance the races but make them awesome and unique at the same time. We can't have a race that destroys the world, but as you've seen with Slimes, we can get pretty creative. Monsters and monster abilities don't really have "stats" per se, so that's not an issue. Races, depending on the power scale and utility in the game world, will be tiered in somewhere.

On mind control - yes. We have plans to go that route. It should be interesting.

How exactly does the 1.5K reward work? Do the individual pledgers, sans the founder, forfeit their other rewards?

No. We've implemented the guild reward so that groups of people can pool together to make a donation. Perhaps it's poorly worded.

So I just saw the Slimepocalypse kickstarter update. If every creature gets equally unique capabilities... Man. Just. Mindblown.

Now, a question about the 500$ reward tier: Is the price of a 1000x1000 private world always going to be in that range, or is that only for this specific kickstarter reward tier that includes many other things? Because 500$ is rather very steep for someone who wants a private world to share with no more than a dozen friends or somesuch... Edit: Though I admit I have no clue what "1000x1000" scale means without having actually played the game, it might be far larger than I am imagining it to be. I'm basically going by what I know of size in games like Minecraft and Terraria, where a length of 1000 is large but certainly not 500$ worth of large.

It's literally 1000 tiles by 1000 tiles. If you've played the sandboxes, you know what a tile is.

Also, you aren't paying for the private sandbox. You're donating to the game, and getting a reward for supporting the project. When the game is released, we'll be offering developer toolkit licenses which will allow you to build your own game world. Also, you'll be able to have a private sandbox regardless, it just won't be 1000x1000.

Again, you aren't buying a 1000x1000 world. That's not what the rewards are for.

About the whole Obelisk system I've been reading about on the forum:

It's mentioned that new obelisks light up (and thus expand the land) when more players join the game world, at what rate does that happen? How dense/sparse will human/monster population be spread?

Also, it's mentioned that obelisks also turn off if there are too little people active in the world, making the area inaccessible again. Does it turn off if, say, there is one person still active in that obelisk's range, but everyone else there is inactive? Because it would seem silly to force a person to abandon his home and land whenever population in his area drops for some reason.

We don't have a set threshold for this. The system is in place to avoid the problems of other sandbox MMOs that have MASSIVE game worlds, but not a massive playerbase.

Ideally, humans will have enough room to grow, but still see each other on a regular basis. Certain monsters (and dwarves) will begin underground, so that will thin out density topside a bit. Again, it's something that will have to be balanced. We don't want players smashed against each other, but at no point should the game seem devoid of entities. That's just not fun.

Also, it's mentioned that obelisks also turn off if there are too little people active in the world, making the area inaccessible again. Does it turn off if, say, there is one person still active in that obelisk's range, but everyone else there is inactive? Because it would seem silly to force a person to abandon his home and land whenever population in his area drops for some reason.

If activity is taking place in an area on a regular basis, it's safe to assume the area will not vanish. Likewise, it wouldn't vanish or fade if someone lived there, unless something terrible happens.

I'm excited about this. H&H was great but I didn't like how there wasn't much customization to the buildings. If Topia ends up as promised, it'll be right up my alley.

Keep up the good work!

There's literally no way it cannot end up "as promised", because as developers, we give a damn. It's going to happen, it's just a question of time and support from the awesome community.

OK, true. That does look wierd.

HeLo HuMaN TrAdEr. I Am AlSo HuMaN TrAdEr.
WoUlD YoU LiKe SoMe BrAnD NeW GiAnT CaVe SpIdEr SiLk SOCKS!?
ThEy ArE In ThE CaVe FoR... ChEaP! SeE ThEm StIcKiNg OuT ThE EnTeReNcE? TaNtAlIzIng? No?
JuSt Go In AnD GeT ThEm. I HaVe HuNdReDs FoR YoU!

...
...
ThIs Is NOT A TrAp!
TrUsT Me!

This will be implemented. XD

Muahaaa.

Now I just need to develop a school of illusion powers practicable by arthropods. The scripts you showed on IRC look like a good start. (Poof, giant spider is a rat... no wait, REGULAR spider!)

NINJA INFILTRATOR SPIDERS! We'll sneak into your camp in the dead of night and steal the juciest of you for our children to feed on! MUAHAAA!

That could happen. We just explored the depth and power of the spell/power system, and I soiled myself. It's amazing. And easy to use.

More details later on.

Slimes seem kinda adorable.
Spiders... they seem like spiders.  Albeit spiders that lay eggs in corpses.
...
The bodies they lag eggs in are corpses, right?
...
Oh Lord, there goes that good night's sleep.

I mean... They WILL be corpses...

I think slimes might be one of the funner monsters to play as at first, at least while still learning the scripting API. Individual slimes are cheap and low maintenance (at least I assume, from how I see slimes in most fantasy worlds), so you do not need to bother with complicated actions such as advanced self-preservation and planning ability or somesuch for the individuals, and can instead work on hivemind behavior based on a few basic goals that a slime hive would have. Or maybe just concentrate on nurturing one large slime that just moves around in a cave until it bumps into something edible, attempts to consume it, and then continues just wandering around whether it was successful or not, eventually splitting/reproducing to create a smaller slime that then moves a certain distance from the original slime's "territory" and starts doing the same roaming thing, etc...

Absolutely. The IRC channel is full of hilarious examples of slime behavior.