a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Oh, and the rate that you consume food depends on how hot or cold you are. If you dress warmly and stay near a fire, you consume food much more slowly.
If you put clothes on your baby and keep them warm, they will need to be fed much less often too.
1.
In the ideal case, every player who joins the game joins as a baby. On the other hand, we NEVER make a player wait to join the game. Everyone should join instantaneously.
Here's how I balance these two factors:
Every female character in the game who is of fertile age can have at most two young babies at any one time. If a given female has two living young babies, the next baby born will go to some other female.
In the rare case that EVERY female has two living young babies, the next player to join will spawn as a new Eve character, elsewhere on the map. Eve is zapped into existence fully grown up and fertile.
Thus, if there's a sudden surge of new players, there could be a bunch of Eve's spawned to cope with the surge.
But each Eve can have 2 babies, so even during a surge, 2/3 of the surge players will be babies, and only 1/3 of them will be Eve's.
2.
Everyone is hungry all the time. There's a bar on the screen that shows your stomach and how full it is. Babies and elderly people have very small stomachs, meaning they need to eat more frequently to survive. As you grow up, your stomach gets bigger, allowing you to go on longer journeys without risk of dying from hunger along the way. Toward the end of life, your stomach shrinks back down again.
3.
I've thought about this, but I'm not sure. One idea is that way high in the tech tree is "the button," a doomsday machine that will reset the world. People in the game can then fight over whether or not to create or use the button.
Of course, during testing, the world may need to reset from time to time, but so far, we haven't reset it. The goal is to never reset it for development reasons if it can be avoided.
We may find that the game is more interesting with some kind of regular reset schedule (for example, once a week or month). The game is VERY different at the beginning of civilization than it is at the end.
However, players looking for a "simple" life can always wander away from the center of civilization into the wilderness. There are no fixed "ages" in the game, and different tech levels can exists simultaneously in different pockets of the map, just like real life.
And the map has plenty of room for this. It's larger than 30,000 times the surface area of planet Earth and would take more than 34 continuous, real-world years to walk from one edge to the other.
Claspa, not sure if you are on my testers email list (been maintaining it since Sleep Is Death). If not, please email me, and I'll add you.
Well, if you have any questions for me, fire away.
Friends and family testing has been going well. We're right on the verge of being ready for some early, small-scale public alpha testing. The game is in a pretty stable state with a comprehensive batch of starter content (from rocks all the way to forging steel---each game system has an example piece of content in place).
The art collective where we have office space is losing its lease, so we're in the middle of an upheaval as we prepare to move to a new office. As soon as we're settled there, we'll be working on another few weeks of solid content creation. At that point, we'll be contacting our early alpha testers and delivering builds to people.
The development process for this game is intricate with a lot of moving parts. That's been true for some of my other games in the past, but keeping people up to date on what's going on with development has always been a manual, tedious process.
I've been doing a lot of scripting work on the website to turn it into an automated information hub for documenting our development process. The latest news---like this post---is pulled out of the forums automatically and displayed here. There's a log of concept art, and a very straight-forward scanner-to-website pipeline, so we can keep the flow of website visuals coming. And the Update Log automatically catalogs the new objects in each game update. We plan for hundreds of updates, and thousands of objects, over the next few years---there's no way we were going to be posting manual updates about all of that stuff.
Finally, the homepage automatically presents a sampling of the latest information from each source.