Gentelmen.
I'm here to present you my quite ambitious game called Ymir.
Considering the little credibility one gets when announcing he's gonna make an online multiplayer game all alone with no coding experience, i quietly worked on my project for 2 years before planning to communicate more extensively about it, until i got some serious things to show.
Ymir has just reached the alpha stage and though its unbalanced, crippled with bugs and exploits, it's now actually playable and - i hope - entertaining ( and addictive according to the few people who got to test it ).
Along with this alpha milestone, the first game of Ymir that went on for a few weeks with a small group of friends/testers just ended yersterday with a huge final battle between a coalition of players VS an evil traitor who pillaged and attacked a few of us.
Ymir is the mix of a 4X game ( like Civlization ) , a building constructor ( Anno, Caesar.. ) and an online STR game ( Stronghold kingdoms, Travian... ).
It's a day by day online game of strategy with a stand-alone client (not a browser game!).
In this game, each player controls a faction of Pigmen living in a fully persistent online world.
The current objective is a max 100 players per server on persistant mode( so not really a 'massivly' multiplayer game).
Also, with a variety of tweakable speed settings, the game will have a more "real-time" mode for players who just want to play with friends in a more traditionnal way.
The world is composed of tiles, and each tile matches a unique region you can colonize and build a city on.
Each region is procedurally generated to match the worldmap.
Rivers, deserts, hills, swamps, northern forests, grassland... In each one of those, you'll find some random ressources like ore deposits, wild animals or cultivable plants.
Starting usually with a tribe in late neolithic, you develop your cilivilization discovering new knowledges, building cities, gathering resources and interacting with the other players.
Like an online browser game in Ymir your people is persistent. Your citizens produce, consume, breed even when you're offline.
Ymir is a complex city builder and management game where you will have to handle a lot of different variables.
Population and economy are key aspects of the game. Population is divided in social classes, and each social class gets an income depending on how well they sold the ressources they produced ( farmers selling their food at the market to the rest of the population, or miners selling stone to the player for a new building ). The price of each ressource is dynamic, and based on offer/supply and wealth balance in your society. There is no predetermined "expensive" ressource : if you have a small elite of rich pigmens in your city and only produce a small amount of pottery, that product will likely adjust its price to maximize benefits and become expensive, only available to those rich. Start producing a lot of it, and as it will become more beneficial to sell more at a smaller price : the price will drop. With technologies, you'll gain tools to influence and control your economy, like providing social help to some poor class or adjusting income tax and VAT tax.
Population cannot be directly controled. Like Tropico, they breed naturally and will create slums if you do not provide enough housing. Population has many caracteristics, like "Life quality", "Health", "Intelligence", "Hapyness"... all those logically influencing each other and defined by your actions. For exemple, diversified foods and proper housing are keys to a good health, which will buff your population Growth and give your more actives to work in your buildings. "Life quality" ,influencing their will to breed and their intelligence, will depend on how well their needs are satisfied : food, housing, clothing... SOmetimes your actions will have unexpected consequences and will make you wonder " why the hell this happened ? ".
In Ymir building more is not always the better : sometimes you'll be in a situation where distributing more of this specific ressource will unbalance your society, and understanding how things work is a part of the game and will differenciate the good manager from the bad.
There is many ressources to produce and gather on those Casear-like warehouses, giving you a visual satisfaction of your wealth and many buildings to build and upgrade. Each building evolve on 4 levels, improving efficiency and ressource production. Some buildings can create "annexes": a sub building belonging to the main one and giving an additional production. The most common, for exemple, beeing the "Field" annex belonging to a Farm building. But it can be mining shafts for a foundry, or a quarry for a stone mason etc...
Players will get advanced diplomatic tools, beeing able to establish permanent trade routes, tributes, vassality, military access...
Players can create "formations". Those are the game units. They can hold ressources and any combination of troops: you can create trade caravans with a small armed escort, setters carrying ressources to colonize a new tile, or just a regular army composed of archers, footpigs and cavalry. When to ennemy armies meet on a same tile, they trigger a battle that can be witnessed in real time in the region view. Unlike many other online games, those battles are not instantaneous and allies can reinforce the armies during the battle.
Armies will be really expensive to maintain and create, requiring adult males, equipement, salary and constant replenishment, lowering your growth.
My next objectives are to gather enough people around this project, keep stabilizing this first playable alpha version for a wider test and eventually preparing a kickstarter if enough people find this project worthy.
-> Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ymir/111377258970753?fref=ts -> Website
http://ymir-online.eu/Thanks for reading
I hope you find this project interesting, and if so, a facebook like is greatly apreciated as its my current best way to measure interest!
I will now start to work on a trailer, and also a customizable avatar system and post my progress here when i have something new to show.
( sorry for the english, not my native language! )
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