Allies, Enemies, and Carpentry

 

Pretty wood shavings!

‘Hoy all! And Happy New Year!

    Hope you all had a good one. ‘21 was a hell of a rollercoaster for the Potential Games Studios team and ‘22 promises to be wilder  (and personally, starting to date again)! Now that we've gotten a lot of the pieces for a ship together it's time to bind them together in an Alpha. In the next couple of months we’ll get that together.  I`ll shoot another video and you can all listen to my melodious voice, maybe even with guest stars from the team.

    Firstly we have made excellent progress on not one, but two woodworking puzzles. All credit goes to CalicoRackham.  The first is classic carpentry, using the pieces and making progress, however our system will allow us to create any sort of shapes and styles we want! We will work towards making some extra large and strangely shaped versions.

Pretty good looking right!?

The second is called Joinery.  It works like Woodoku, but it clears when sections are completed and allows for bonuses and combos! Joinery and Carpentry will also have different scoring systems. One will be more speed based, with precision and perfect placement secondary to speed, while the other will be more focused on methodical and precise work. 

Allies and Enemies

With the new year it's also time to think about the people in our lives, those we call friends and those we have a feud to the death with! 

…Nobody? Just me?

We are designing the framework for how individuals and groups will interact with each other. My goal with these has been to make them easy to handle, but detailed enough that each person and group can have the exact relationship that they want. Here are some core details:

Players will have an infinite list for friends/hearties/acquaintances. Groups will have control over both their internal ranks, as well as what sort of alliances they form with others.

For individuals

Players can declare individuals as their friends, this isn't much but showing in a list of friends. Stats like #of adventures together, #of whispers, #of mutual friends, and time as friends can be viewed. Players can also improve this level of trust, allowing the individuals or groups to access private inventories, ships, manage shops, etc.

Players can also allow individuals to send them messages in the game, which will show as a notification on their phone. You will still have to login to view the whole message, we ain’t in the business of text messages.

Players can elect to be notified if/when an individual takes items from their private inventories, they cannot however undo it. Containers can be marked to not notify or be available for anyone.

Groups

Groups will be able to make formal relationship declarations with other groups, these are presented and agreed upon by both parties but DO NOT NEED TO BE EQUAL! Some of these options include:

• Ability to board ships belonging to the group

• Ability to listen to or participate in the the group's chat, with more options for all the levels of the chat

• Ability to gain group benefits such as store discounts

• Ability to participate as part of the group for group actions

• Ability to engage each other in battle (cease fire rules)

• Requirements to assist in group defense (true alliances)

• Allow or block trade between the groups

• Allow or block alliances with other groups (the mean girls condition)

Groups can also declare individuals friends, though not if they are part of a distrusted or hostile group.

The basic options like neutral, truce, partnership or alliance will include a number of the above in their basics, but can be modified.

The only step between neutrality and open hostilities would be distrust, which may include things like not working for that group's ships and blocking trade. A group that breaks off relationships immediately drops to distrust for a period before outright hostilities can be declared. An amount of group merit can be spent to shorten this duration.

We do not have a hard design laid out for group structures.  The two steps, crew & flag, seem simple enough. I do plan to allow players to either customize their group structure, with specific levels and access, or to use a default template with captains, officers, etc. If you have suggestions please let us know. 

    Thanks for everyone's continued interest in our project, I'm making sure the team feels all your positive vibes! Drop us a line or join the discussion on our discord: 

Discord: https://discord.gg/HedS4wrBFn

Website: https://www.potentialgamestudios.com/

Next post will be soon and will detail out more of how to make enemies and alienate people!