Will you eventually try out multiplayer in the game?
That's a tough one! I will be looking into multiplayer for the home island as a start - eg hanging out with your friends on your home island, being able to see the host's built creations as he modifies them in real time.
For the main game with the storm, it's getting incredibly hard to do multiplayer with the new features added incrementally at the current pace. Unless there's another developer working on the game with me, it's going to be challenging to adapt the current mechanics for multiplayer. I've some a high level analysis of what multiplayer needs to support and here is the list:
- Buildings + Resource production
- Shared inventory items and item counts
- Settler counts + settlers AI (idle vs working) + settlers movements and animations
- Settler professions, school learning progress and status
- Individual settler hunger values
- Pets, pet abilities
- Happiness, electricity values
- Time of day, storm timer
- Storm cloud (sync lightning strikes, destruction of buildings)
- Islands' randomized sequence (likely seeded)
- Island dialogs chosen
- Island outcomes (eg windmill, time pause mechanic)
- Story islands' progress (eg Faraday's clues)
- Special buildings like shields need to sync their times struck, and shatterdomes need to sync their HP value
- Hot air balloon, trader, trader interval, trading items, trading blueprints
- Cards? Building unlocks? World collectibles?
- Sickness mechanic (tundra biome)
- Expeditions, planes (sky biome)
- Structural integrity (underwater biome)
- Quark bonuses selected, quark generation, quark quantities
- Turret bullets, bullet damage, storm HP
- Character traits
- Research levels
- Character accessories and customization appearance
thats a long list.
but i liked the idea of the multiplayer in home island and i got a feeling you can do with this something
espacially with the pets.
i am not sure if its a good idea but you can do fights between the pets(even tho it would look like pokemon unless you thing about a different kind of fight).
in short i have a feeling you can do something with the pets and the home island.
hmm, a curious and definitely interesting possibility. I want to expand the home island a bit more and perhaps will share a Notion document in a future post on potential directions I have in mind.
I want this game to have a sort of peaceful vibe after going up against the storm, like retreating into a sort of respite after each battle. So I am building the Home Island into a bigger thing.
Home Island 1.0: Pets (this is done, but needs more work to integrate pets into the game, and people currently don't visit Home Island enough)
Home Island 2.0: Runs will now give permanent items like planks.
Planks and other permanent currencies can be used to build up your cozy home island.
You can maybe(?) also gain pet food to merge pets and level them up. Rare boxes unlock more epic furniture, skyboxes, island skins.
I will roll some of these out into the free version to give a taste of the experience.
Home Island 3.0: Farming and exploration. Home island is 100% peaceful and a place to rest between runs. Explore the world with no time limit, build a boat. Sail the seas. Go fishing. Whacky ideas: Grow lollipop farms to feed your pets.
Home island 4.0: Open world exploration.
