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[anselm_eickhoff]

This is a collection of ideas I have for a project.
I have other stuff to do right now, but I'll write down my ideas here for you.

Also, I'm not a native speaker, so the lore might contain errors or sound strange.

Lore

There is a small continent that not many know of, we call it the Lands forever Cursed.
At first sight, it is quite similar to more familiar places, consisting of lush forests,
meadowy valleys, dry deserts and unforgiving tundras.

But you will notice strange things about the folk living there, should you travel by:
Some of them claim to be hundrets of years old, some claim to remember things from their past lifes.
They don't seem to age and they don't have children.

Some of them work together, some are thieves and some even murderers.
But still, they all work towards a common goal: They want to find all magic scripture
and spiritual tomes that the gods have hidden in the nooks and crannies of the countryside.
With them, they can gain a complete understanding of our cosmos.

The gods don't make it so easy for them, however:
Regularly they unleash natural disasters to destroy accumulated wealth, or even worse,
libraries of knowledge. This is why we call it the Lands forever Cursed.

But the folk there have also been given the blessing of their special state of being.
This frees them from some of the constraints of the material world.
The things they find may free them even more...

Mechanics

• (Massive) Multiplayer, community-hosted servers
• Persistent 2D World (per server) that is destroyed regularly
• Realtime (not turn based)
• PvP/Coop
• Exploration
• Gathering
• Fighting
• Crafting
• Building (world can be modified)
• Trading
• Permadeath

Graphics

• Tile-based, top down pixel art

Technology

• Procedural World Generation
• Client: Canvas/WebGL
• Server: Erlang
• Game logic on server
• Communication: Websockets

As is obvious, everything is a concept/WIP, even the name.
If you are already interested, have a question or some feedback, let me know  

[anselm_eickhoff]

Made some radical lore changes 

[anselm_eickhoff]

I did a little tilesheet work that I posted earlier today.

I wanted to see the tilesheet in action though, because the rocks have a lot of special transition cases one needs to check.

So I implemented a little tile world renderer.
You can play with it here:


http://aeoutput.com/lfc_proto1

It creates random world, with two octaves of simplex noise.
You can modify the world: left click = create hill, right click = destroy hill.

It renders every tile every frame, I get 20fps, meh.

[koiwai]

Don't you think that (almost) total destruction of the world is too much?

Alternatives could be:

- There are natural disasters like earthquakes that destroy significant parts of the world (1/4 or 1/2 of it), but players are informed in advance, say, by certain events like huge thunderstorms, blood rains, or simply by shaman's prophecies..

- World is not destroyed, but significantly rearranged, as if you imagine a gigantic plough that is not destroying everything, but displace things from their original position, leaving ruined buildings, but some small parts of the world remain intact. All sorts of evil creatures may come to the surface (from hell?) at this point.

I don't know..

[anselm_eickhoff]

Well the world destroying so far is a deus ex machinima to prevent the world from getting to large (computationally) and keeping things fresh.

After some more thought, that might not even be necessary though. I plan on the world to be fully procedural. This means that I 'only' have to store and transmit the modifications the players made.

Also, I am drifting more and more to a dedicated server model like minecraft and away from a 'one world one server', MMO-style model. It's simply not feasible for me (yet). Then each server owner can decide for themselves if they want to restart the world.

I adjusted the lore.

I like your idea about smaller natural disasters though, and that they can be anticipated.

Maybe, they can even be caused by someone: the server admins or 'gods'. Might lead to some fun dynamics...