http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_phone_novel is interesting in this regard too...

Wonderful! BTW I think something is wrong with your post.

Something I thought about after hearing the voice of a child in the teaser: Is the main character originally a boy, who was put into a hibernation chamber? The chambers are broken and everybody got older while sleeping. And when the former seven years old boy wakes up he is suddenly a 47 years old man.

Something like this happens in one episode ("Planet der Reserven") of "Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot". Since it's a comedy series the episode is very funny, but even there you can feel the horror of getting older in an instant.

Explore wasteland with time limit.

Explore wasteland without time limit.

if you're used to western rpgs based on DnD archetypes (i.e. most of them) you will be confused at first because it is based instead on the dark eye and uses some different skills and ideas, but you will figure it out. no worries!

das schwarze auge (the dark eye) is so much so much better than d&d imo. no wonder d&d is kind of unpopular here in the german speaking world.

Why's it better?

the rules are less combat-centric, there's a broader range of skills for different stuff and character generation is more detailed. i also like that it's not just a "system" but comes with a fleshed-out setting (that isn't just a generic tolkien ripoff) out of the box. in short it feels like a more complete roleplaying experience to me than d&d.

also i grew up with it

this.

(disclaimer: I never played DnD PnP, just heard of it...)

DSA/Aventurien is a very "realistic"/authentic approach for a fantasy world.

on the downside: with more rules and content you might feel limited in your fantasy. there also might occur discussions about history, gods, appropriate behavior of elves etc. because so much is written down, some guys always know better...
of course good players know to handle this.

just imagine an rpg made by slightly pedantic Germans.


Amusing American Amazon review:

This game system is very math-heavy. If you like juggling lots of numbers while trying to run your character, you'll love it. Otherwise, you'll quickly learn to despise the system, since the math constantly interrupts roleplaying. It's obvious that sales of the game, between 2003 and 2011 (now) have been horrible at best, since the company that translated the game for use over here in the U.S. has long since gone out of business. The only reason I bought the book is to act as a manual of sorts for the computer game Drakensang, which I'm told is highly underrated. Of course, the company that made the computer game also went out of business.

The ruleset version before the one he reviewed is even more complex. And he only reviews the basic ruleset for beginners . AFAIK currently there are 3 basic rulebooks: one for magic, one for combat and one for character management. Of course there are additional content books with additional rules. Selling rule books is an important monetization strategy for DSA ^^.

looks great you might want to look at "Ritter Rost" stuff, a German children's book/media series, for inspirational purposes.

Maybe a currency that measures the network effect would be more precise. I assume that any technical thing can be rebuilt by pirates. Social networks are unique and can not be copied. Blizzard cannot offer the same community as pirates and the other way arround. A bad official multiplayer game operator may even offer a less popular gaming network than an inoffical service operated by pirates or other third party operators. Afaik http://garena.com is a very big/popular battle.net alternative that offers multiplayer gaming even for cracked versions of Warcraft 3 etc.

Also similar games: Dungeon Overlord (http://www.dungeonoverlord.com/) (has automatic combat) and My life as a Dark Lord (http://www.mylifeasadarklord.com/). A nice thread about this kind of ideas http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=20222.0 But anyway the world definitely needs more games of this kind!  

I'm looking forward to your results.

I guess you already read the optimization hints here http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplatformruntimes/shared/air3-2_flashplayer11-2_p6_releasenotes.pdf ?

Maybe you can rewrite the Bitmap Test from http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/ for stage3d. It would allow a nice comparison to "normal" flash and html5 canvas on android devices.

I can test with a Samsung Galaxy S II device.

I think just alternating materials is not a very satisfying way of making new items. But I don't know if people really want to create their own stuff either. I think there is at least one game where you can create any costume via some kind of 3D sewing tool (what is the name of this game??, I think I saw a video linked here on tigsource).

When you introduce something that is more than simply alternating materials (alternating materials would be just some kind of optimization game), e.g. some kind of design tool, the problem of how to reflect different designs in-game arises. Afaik when crafting creatures etc. in Spore you just acummulate key accessories w/o any influence of the visual design, to me this is kind of depressing. Good design ideas and creativity have no effect.

For alchemy one could allow players to make their own recipes via an alchemy lab simulator (something like this).

For enchantments one could create some kind of visual programming language that looks like runes to allow players to create custom very complex magic-fueled game interactions.

For custom cooking recipes one could try to implement a cooking simulator similar to the alchemy sim, but the saying  “the eye must be pleased as well” is hard to represent ingame.

All items that depend even more on their spatial design (like weapons, armor etc.) will be hard to make really customizable in a believable way. I think in these cases templates that always have the same stats and that can only be modified in limited ways make most sense.

Just discovered this topic via "Show unread posts since last visit."

Awesome project!

Maybe this music inspires you http://music.replogen.net/ http://unternull.bandcamp.com/album/surround-me (there are certainly many other industrial...noise... artists, but anyway ^^)

Just something I pay too much attention to: the radiation warning symbol on the door of the doc mate has a strange orientation. To me a wrong depiction/orientation always looks a bit shallow and too many video games do it wrong (from fallout to duke nukem).

make a le petit prince kind of adventure with many puzzles in different levels/planets/rooms.

Some recommendations for anime with a calm meditative inspiring mood:
Kino's Journey
A Traveller`s Diary
Mushishi
Natsume Yuujinchou
xxxHOLiC

(similar ones wanted)

http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=895 there you can see the groups who subbed and or released it.
Maybe you want to look here http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search2/sublanguageid-all/moviename-planetes

My untended list, any suggestions?
@Hangedman: If you like Ergo Proxy, you might also like Texhnolyze.

[pics...]
@Chromanoid I'm definitely going to do my best to make sure it becomes a game. I just suck at music and I'm only ok at programming so I probably can't do it all myself.
I actually originally had a human main character: but I wanted something a little simpler because making all the enemies in that style was getting tedious. In the process of simplifying he kinda changed species

nice stuff I actually thought of a human main character (like the cute one you posted) together with these more simple creatures. I agree with you that the style should be similar, but if the player stands out a bit it might increase the feeling of being a visitor to a foreign world in a positive way.

@Core Xii

 

@Rykuth: Looks great! Please say this is going to be a game. BTW I would prefer a human/astronaut player character.

gfx reminds me of munchkin did you think about making a electronic card game instead of a text adventure? as far as i know there is no good card adventure game with rogue-like and munchkin aspects

I think pay-what-you-want-payment-models answer your questions. Yes and Yes. When you have to constantly pay a little $P for a pirated version this might also be a reason to buy it at some point. As an example I even bought a game I love multiple times (I own several versions of Fallout 2, the version on Steam has the lowest $P price btw ^^) I bought it multiple times although I am not averse to piracy, I even had to pay for a warning letter...

When some parts of your game are offered as a service you may have to fight piracy to survive. The good thing is that these services are often easier to protect from pirates than the game itself.

When looking at piracy with the 4 currencies you don't fight piracy you just maximize profit. Increasing the pain-in-the-butt-price for non-paying customers or so is much different from "fighting piracy". Legal threats also increase the pain-in-the-butt-price, but nowadays they will probably decrease the $I price for pirated versions in an extreme way.

I think the problem of a world with only donationware and pay-what-you-want payment models is, that it has probably a severe negative effect on $I. We use $M prices as estimates for the real value of things. Without this estimation framework you as a consumer cannot estimate the value of things. $M as estimation framework is also why premium pricing works.

BTW I think one can describe free to play games and virtual item trading with similar measures. Paying for pay-to-win items might have a high $I price but they may stop a constant $P fee.

ah just talked to my gf, she used the version on your page, there was the button, but it didn't work. now i remember the situation correctly. i dont know if it works now, maybe it has something to do with her computer, i will check tomorrow

I just read the articles word by word. I think you answered this already "I think you should measure $P $I $T in $ too. Everything has a price". I think it would be a good idea to express these other currencies in hard $. This would be a good way to tell a big game company manager how distribution methods, company reputation, DRM barriers etc. influence the price perception of a product. When it is possible to track/estimate the numbers of pirating users while decreasing the product price during the product life cycle it should be possible to roughly estimate some values.

I think the best way to overcome pirating would be more P due to not working online features. You could tie the export-save-game-feature to legal users. Using different savegame formats for different product versions and an online converter might be a good idea in general . I'm afraid $I is very unstable and unfavorably tied to the price.

cool I just skimmed through the articles for the theories. I will have to tell her. The strange thing is that I didn't find any button in the flash version, because I thought there should be a way. Are your sure there is a way even in the in-browser version?

edit: wtf i just checked the web version, there is a button 0o. I was sure there was no button when I checked last time  .