Otherworld

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Otherworld is a collaborative roleplaying game that takes place in a limbo between life and death. Your character died some time between the years of 1530 and 1800 AD. Instead of landing in Heaven, they landed in a strange world where you start off with nothing and have to craft every item from scratch, including iron and steel. All the characters exist in the same, shared world. You can unlock zones and locations to advance further and discover new resources. Lead lost souls into their destinations to earn coins and purchase items and livestock.   Check out the Trello board (link available on the website) to read about potential new features and suggest your own for a chance to influence the direction the game develops.   Actions use either AP, which is gained once an hour, or timers, with repeats ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. The game is designed for people who spend a lot of time on the computer and like stopping by to carry out short actions between browsing.   The game includes a separate chat for each location. Currently there is no worldwide chat, but this might eventually change.

This is a complete rewrite of a 2017 project, which was available online for a year and then closed, because I had lost focus.

The 2017 version had a grid map, whereas this version has predetermined locations with exhaustible resource deposits instead of infinite resources. The map is hand crafted instead of procedurally generated, allowing more control.

This version has most actions revolve around the use of timers rather than spending action points to complete actions immediately (hence the Idle category). The game is rather fast paced and allows gathering hundreds of units of resources in a matter of hours, sometimes even as fast as 5-10 minutes depending on the resource type.

There's a series of quests intended to familiarize new users with the mechanics. More quests will be added later. Now there's also a short tutorial.

  • ability to buy items with points you earn from completing quests
  • a second continent
  • new resources
  • furniture
  • most likely farming (ability to introduce crops to a location where they aren't naturally found)
  • maybe alternative stone tools
  • rivers and bridges
  • domesticated animals and ability to harvest eggs and milk and make butter and sausages
  • masks, which increase your chances of intimidating another character

Roasts

Mike 1 year ago

Mechanics Game Graphics
I'm not into text-based games, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Good:
-Everything seems to work properly and is easy to use.
-I like the features to interact with other players on many levels.
-The quests are good to get into the game and feel rewarding.
-The systems (e.g., crafting) have plenty of content and look very polished.

Needs work:
- Consider giving players the option to create a temporary account without providing an email address, at least for the beta.
-The pace of the game is too slow for my taste. I'm rather impatient, so 5 minutes feels like a long time to me.
-The game feels empty. I was reading about NPCs, but there seemed to be none around.
-Graphics would be nice. A map to see where you're going would help a lot.

I think this game has potential. If you manage to get players into the game so that the social features can be used, it might be an interesting experience.
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IlonaW 1 year ago

Hi, thank you so much for reviewing my game
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IlonaW 1 year ago

Aw man, I wrote a long reply but it only posted the first row and then apparently deleted all the rest because there was an emoji and apparently that breaks the system. Let's see if I can summarize it from memory. - I could allow players to create one character with an unverified email address. They can't really do permanent damage, since there is no permadeath in the game, but the other day (before I put a cap on characters) someone created 11 characters and beat up a couple of people, creating 200+ events in the chat. - I could potentially edit the game so that 1 minute turns into 10 seconds and so forth. Currently the shortest supported timer is 1 minute, but it's changeable with programming, it just requires a bit of work. I'm mainly concerned that since all characters share the same world, if one player crafts all the items, there will be nothing left to accomplish for ones who come later. Some sort of deterioration can be a solution, and also when characters turn inactive and go on vacation, their inventory is inaccessible to others. Since machinery is available to everyone in a location, some sort of breakage/upkeep would have to be introduced, as well as buildings turning into ruins after a while. - About NPCs, currently when someone has a baby, it turns into an NPC after 7 days and can then be used to gather resources for you. The NPCs have no dialog trees, so it's true the world feels empty when PCs aren't saying anything. I'm not experienced with writing dialogue, so I'm going to have to think about how to make the game feel more alive. - I agree a graphical map would be good. I'm going to have to think about what sort of a visual look to go with. I suppose I could create placeholder graphics and upgrade them later when the kinks are ironed out. Again, thanks for taking the time to review this. I really appreciate it.
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