Hesp2, (a little of) the grand design

The idea of Hesp2 is that it will be an environment/world which will allow both players and immortals to easily create content/quests/games/events/etcetera. Community building is very important and we should aim to let players interact with eachother as much as possible. Team player mode should be more important than single player stuff.

Creation:
- Imms will be able to create new player areas in the game.
- There will be a hierarchy among players. For example, high level players can become kings or something like that. They can get an area from their imm which they can then divide among their knights (other players). Normal players can get a house which belongs to one of these kingdoms. They can change descriptions etc. right away in the game. Getting new items/mobs/extensions for their houses should be possible.
- Dynamic creation by the game itself should happen also. I'm not sure yet to what extent it will be possible to create new areas automatically, but that's something interesting to look into. Mobs on the other hand can easily be created by the game itself. In a way this avoids the standard repop system. Also, mob populations should grow dynamically. If nobody kills mobs in a certain area, then it will result in many many mobs in that area. On the other hand, if certain areas are getting killed very often, then mob creation will decrease in those areas. This will force players to find other more densly populated areas.

Cults:
Players will only play one character at the same time, instead of 3 in the current game. I hope this will also increase their 'bonding' with that character. Players should feel more as a real member of The Covenant, The Neutrals or The Dark Alliance. Cults and or guilds/kingdoms should be used more in the game anyway, to increase the 'us versus them' experience for players. Also, it will be necessary for C players to kill D mobs in D areas or else the mobs will just multiply and then D will gain too much power. The other way around also applies of course. Neutrals will be the balancing factor. For example, if D gets too strong, then killing them gains more experience so most N players will go for them. This might in practice be tricky to balance out so maybe this needs some tweaking from the immortals. It's not necessarily a bad thing if D is stronger than C or the other way around, but I think it would be best if it waved around. If that happens naturally or with Imm intervention doesn't really matter =)

Variety:
- There should be a lot of things that you can do in the game. If you're not interested in fighting the game should still be interesting. I could imagine that if you're a king you don't do a lot of fighting yourself.

Easy access:
- Players should be able to enter the world directly, without registering or even logging in first. See this post for more about that.

Integration:
- The website gets a forum (phpbb or something) and there won't be an in-game public message system. Maybe in the future we can make a direct interface between the game and the forums.
- For documentation we can use a wiki on the website. No need to make an in-game system to mimic all that functionality. Again, when everything is advanced to a later stage we could make it so you can read the wiki from within the game directly.
- The frontpage of the website should display a list of who's online. The game can post that data to a website, say every minute or so, and the php frontpage could read that data and display it.
- Players should have player profiles that they can manage themselves. They can be displayed on the website and in the game. Players should be able to upload pictures themselves (no imm needed).
- Through somebody's player profile on the website you should be able to enter the game right in that players house (if they have enabled that).
- Another way to integrate the game with the web is to make dynamic pictures for in your signature on a forum or something. Players could display their name and level in it or something, or their title or various other things from within the game.
- We can use RSS feeds for some things like biweekly highscores, best house awards, etc.


Hmm, this is already becoming a very long post. More ideas later =)

Imm Plane and some client work

After I imported the Immortal Plane which houses some special mobs and of course the immortal rooms I could finally goto my beloved Orange Sky. Too bad items aren't working yet or I would have snatched Katleena's couch =)

I also did some experimenting with the client. I added a view which displays the current room at the top. Other content is just displayed in the bottom for now, but I'm considering splitting everything in different views instead of one big scrolling window of text that you normally have in muds. This view is definitely not final yet since I'm not even sure if it's actually useful :P
Currently you can see which exits a room has by looking at the direction buttons in the lower right. I think a lot of information can be displayed in a visual way like that instead of text.

Anyway, Hesp2 is making progress again and the more I experiment with it, the more ideas I get. I hope to write down a big overview in a next post.

The screenshot below shows two clients with the new view:

SCAN and GOTO

I finally started working on Hesp2 again. It has been more than a month since I last worked on it. I implemented the easy SCAN and GOTO commands to get warmed up again. I need to start making a difference between normal players and Imms soon, cause at the moment everybody can use the goto command. Immortal powers for all!