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Otherworld
by IlonaW
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.
- There's now a guest account system that allows trying out the game without having to provide an email address or come up with a username. Guest accounts can be converted to full accounts by changing the email address to something valid. Guest characters are automatically deleted if inactive for 3 hours or more.
- There have again been a lot of visual changes, including a grainy texture for item and animal divs, as well as awesome textured healthbars with rounded corners!
- The main parts of the interface now load with Ajax, so the side panel only reloads when you carry out an action, rather than every time you change tabs.
- It's now possible to craft a snare, which, when used, prevents an animal from running away, giving you more chances to take it down.
- The craft menu allows viewing which tools boost gathering resources, and by how much.
- Boats can no longer jump over dry land. Water travel is restricted to locations bordering the same body of water. Some locations border multiple bodies of water, allowing using the same boat for both lake and sea.
- Travel and exploration buttons are disabled if travel requirements are not met. It's still possible to explore a landlocked location from a boat but you will not move to it, instead remaining in the same location where you started the exploration.
- It's now possible to make a meat grinder and make sausages out of all kinds of meat. It's possible to use flour and grain as filler. It's even possible to make beer sausages!
- It's possible to reinstall a removed lock on a building. (In the past uninstalled locks could only be reinstalled on a container.)
- Wild animals now have limits which zones they can be encountered.
- Renewed random name generator with more realistic names. Selecting a different sex (or even re-clicking the selected sex) on the character creation page creates a new suggestion as a placeholder text if the character name field is empty. It's now possible to generate long names in addition to short and medium.
- There is now a rudimentary deterioration system for organic resources.
- The color palette for the buttons and alerts was changed to be more harmonious.
Coming up next:
- Ability to make cheese.
- Cots to allow characters to get a healing boost without having to craft expensive beds.
- Different kinds of snares, including a lasso.
- More locations and zones across the sea
- New animals (wild turkey, coyote, raccoon, bobcat)
- New resources (grapes, gold, silver, cotton, strawberries, nuts, beans, cabbage, tomatoes, eggplant, tobacco, avocado)
- Ability to ride horses
- character-specific resource icons that you can click periodically to instantly get some resources without using a timer
- max capacity for buildings/penalty for crafting in an overcrowded building
- Ability to search for animal encounters on purpose, rather than being limited to running into them at random.
Roasts
Mike 11 months ago
Mechanics Game GraphicsI'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.
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.
IlonaW 11 months ago
Hi, thank you so much for reviewing my gameIlonaW 11 months 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.
