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[Archibald]

A simulation of living in a medieval times (rather realistic, without magic and other fantasy elements). You take a role of a peasant/craftsman/merchant/clergy/noble and become a citizen of one of the kingdoms (predefined historical kingdoms only). Each kingdom selects one player as their ruler (usually king/queen) via voting. The ruler make strategic level decisions (starting wars with other kingdoms) and distributes offices among players, but the actual combat is the choice of individual players (if lowly knights players decide to not participate in a battle then the king is powerless). The game is a bit sandbox, neverending and no precised goals (you can strive for individual wealth or for glory & fame or for the wellbeing of your kingdom, or for achieving high social status in your kingdom).

http://www.europe1300.eu (browser based, it's MMO, but it should have around 300-500 active players after the launch to my experience, so not really that massive ). Right now it's in ALPHA stage, partially playable, mostly empty with just a few testers. It will be reset (everything cleared) after it is finished and ready for final release.


I'm looking for feedback (especially high level gameplay stuff that makes the game fun), please, do not sweat over minor problems and glitches, it's alpha, I know about these and will fix them later.


(if you get hooked to the game and wanted to post on the game forums the secret password is "silver", but I read TIG regularly, so it's not really needed)

[eyedrop]

Hi Archibald--

I just played about 15 minutes your game. As you've said it's obviously a little rough around the edges but I did quite enjoy exploring the menus, trying to accrue resources, and tentatively planning my rise to the top. And I like the basic concept, including the commitment to historical accuracy.

That being said, the gameplay is still rather simplistic at this point and there were a couple of features in particular that make me feel like I wouldn't be interested in playing the final version, even if it were finely polished. Primarily I'm thinking about the stamina system. All resources in the game can ultimately be traced back to stamina, which is limited by real time, correct? But stamina is only consumed during user actions. I assume potential stamina is just wasted once your stamina bar fills up, and I approximated that my bar would have gone from empty to full in about 15 hours.

I think there is a fun game here, in which players try to find the most efficient way to use their stamina to accomplish their goals. But the differential between good and bad strategy is small enough that it is easily eclipsed by the frequency with which players log on. You could play really well for a week and then have all those accomplishments erased (relative to other players) by not playing for one day. As it is, I think this game will turn into more of a timesuck that something fun. Even from a commercial perspective alone, the kind of people who play games you have to frequently log into to perform repetitive actions usually aren't interested in historically accurate medieval politics.

Going along with this I'm not sure I don't like having a leveling system. I'm a bit biased because I don't like leveling systems in general, but here it seems redundant to resource management and especially to social ranks (knight, bishop, etc), which serve nearly the exact same function but have historical relevance.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I know these are core features so they're unlikely to be changed but I'm just be honest. 

[Archibald]

Thanks for the feedback! And don't worry about hurting my feelings, I have none


What you wrote is very similar to my personal thoughts, it's not the kind of game I usually make. I had exactly the same reservations as you listed. Still, I have choosen this route because:

The most important thing, "if you don't play you are losing compared to other players". This point is invalid in this kind of game. I mean, it is everlasting, it does not reset or restart. Players don't join at the same time. If you joined a year or two after others... It simply can not be about competition. Such a game can be played only as sandbox game where you don't sweat too much than other, older, players are richer than you. It is not a strategy, it is a simulation.

Frequency of playing. At first I wanted the stamina bar to be filled in 21 hours, then I lowered it... on players' request... They were saying it's boring you can login only once per day and wanted to be forced/encouraged/allowed to login more than once a day. It's not something I fully understand, but since they wish for it (and since similar games force you to login like once per 2-3 hours)...

Levels - I didn't like them too, for this kid of game, originally there were no levels. But the production/crafting was not that thrilling then, you were getting only gold, without any sense of long term progress. So I added experience for performing actions (and levels).
The second, more important reason, is the social ranking. I stringly wanted to avoid the race for noble titles. I mean, only one person per kingdom can be a king. Most need to have lower rank roles. If the rank was the onlky indication of the social status it would lead to dreadful overcompetition inside kingdoms (while kingdoms are meant mostly for cooperation, the other kingdoms are the enemies). Adding levels as the redundant/paralell progress system fixed it nicely.


Anyway, while stamina can not be really changed (altered at most) levels can be changed, it is not the core of the game.

[tigreton]

You will play...

A historical game where "each kingdom selects one player as their ruler (usually king/queen) via voting".

[Archibald]

A historical game where "each kingdom selects one player as their ruler (usually king/queen) via voting".

Yes, that's historically accurate for some countries (of course not everywhere and not all the time). It was called "elected kings" Of course the voting was reserved to nobles only.

Contrary to the common knowledge monarchy almost never was a a dictatorship. Even if voting was not explicitly stated the high nobles were the ones who decided who the king will be, check the War of the Roses in Britain.

Election of the ruler (via voting) was the most fitting to the period, even if not to the letter (because by percentage elected kings were not that common) it still is the most compatible with the spirit of the medieval rule.
A dictator who got power by birth and can rule without approval of the nobles is simply a common mistake by those who get their knowledge from Hollywood movies and has NOTHING to do with history.


But why do I waste my breath, players know better because they saw it on TV... :D

[tigreton]

Haha, I like history and didn't knew that there were so many kings elected via voting. I should read the War of the Roses wikipedia's page hehe.

Btw I registered in the game and after i pressed the button, it redirected me to the login page with the user and password inside the input box. There were the same asterisk as my real password, is it?

PD: you should see "freedom city" from rpgbunny (or any other of his games) to see its "town's page". It has clickable buildings (They have a good map design too). I have the code if you need to see something.

[tigreton]

Well, you have Devana, it is opensource. See other games like that at sourceforge, for example.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/devana/

[Archibald]

Thanks for trying the game!

Haha, I like history and didn't knew that there were so many kings elected via voting. I should read the War of the Roses wikipedia's page hehe.

Yes, I too learned a lot of interesting counterintuitive things when researching for this game, even though I was rather knowlegable in medieval times before. Still, after more clear investigation I had to change my views The most annoying thing about making a realistic game is that a lot of people who want realism will accuse you of being unrealistic... Not by ill will or heavy ignorance, more by not reading enough books (or even by reading books of one country, for example if you limit yourself to history of Britain things like Electorial cities of German States would be a complete enigma to you). What's more I had to often make a choice, should I go to literal meaning or with the spirit? Like county of Flanders, in theory they were not a sovereign kingdom, but in practice they were simply deciding to which kingdom they belong by revolts. So, if I were to go for literal meaning I should exclude these, but it would make no sense in terms of real events that happened during middleages... So, I upgraded it to sovereign entity and put on the map, even through you can't find any "Flanders" country if you look at medieval maps (medieval maps being another interesting topic, I was unable to find even two maps of the same period that were similar, not to mention identical :D, simply "borders" and "kingdoms" were much more theorethical that we perceive these nowadays). So, it is an endless battle to me to exaplain why it is indeed historically accurate contrary to what the player thinks
Well, no one said making games should be easy
 

Btw I registered in the game and after i pressed the button, it redirected me to the login page with the user and password inside the input box. There were the same asterisk as my real password, is it?

Yes, after register it auto copied your login/pass to the login box so you can login conveniently. It's the only one time it does it, after that if your password is stored depends on your browser settings.

PD: you should see "freedom city" from rpgbunny (or any other of his games) to see its "town's page". It has clickable buildings (They have a good map design too). I have the code if you need to see something.

The code is not a problem, art assets are Anyway, first I would like to focus on gameplay, once it is fun to play I can worry about it being pretty.

[tigreton]

Yes, after register it auto copied your login/pass to the login box so you can login conveniently. It's the only one time it does it, after that if your password is stored depends on your browser settings.

Pfff...

Do you mean that you send the password to that form? Clean? You shouldn't do that! Never.

You can create a button called "Login now" without writing anything.
Or just a page where it says that "you have login successfully" creating the sessions variable with an md5 to the password.

If you did that, i suppose you are saving the password in plain text in the database. Don't do that, save it like md5.

In phpclasses.org you have great login classes to see. Some of them have a coockie way to re-store sessions after closing the browser.

[tigreton]

Damn, you made the same in all your games...

[Archibald]

Do you mean that you send the password to that form? Clean? You shouldn't do that! Never.

It's HTTP protocol, not HTTPS, you always send encrypted password each time you login to any website (exactly as on this forum and all other forums and games and everything).
Anyway, I don't want to go into details here, because I have a policy of not talking about security measures, for security reasons Take into account that I was making these games for 7 years now and there are more than 200k accounts total and there never was even one instance of a security problem Of course, using the same password on a forum/online game that you use for your bank account (protected by the troublesome but more secure HTTPS) is not a good idea on principle.


Can you give some feedback on the gameplay? I'm still struggling with this, especially the "feeling of progress and acomplishment".

[CowBoyDan]

Sony has been making games longer, I'll bet they thought they knew what they were doing with security too huh?

[tigreton]

I think i didn't understand you. All "medium" sized cms/blogs/forums/games use encrypted passwords with or without HTTPS.

Sending to the client the plain password, it's a bad behaviour, Always. You need to encrypt it. You never have to "play" with the plain password nor saving it into the database like plain text.

I don't have your experience, i never finalized a "big" project, just my small ones without that many accounts. But when i learned how to make a login system, i learned to encrypt it.

I'll see the game and come back with more constructives criticisms

PS: when using the lost_password page
Warning: sprintf() [function.sprintf]: Too few arguments in /home/europe/public_html/lostpassword.php on line 98

PS2: you shouldn't mail the password to e-mails. A link to restore it would be better.

Just my two cents.