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[mrsquish]

Premise:
A survival game whereby the player starts off with nothing more than a leaf covering their privates. They must first learn to survive in their environment by acquiring skills through activities and exploration. Once they have reached a certain level of resourcefulness they will begin to attract NPC followers which will serve the players provided their needs are being met. Followers can be taught and put to work using their skills to further the community.

Game Mechanics:
Health:
Health is extremely important in this game and effects almost anything a player or NPC undertakes, including the speed of movement and any other activity.
There are 4 aspects to a person's overall health; hunger, hydration, rest and wounds\sickness. All of these aspects to health have different requirements. Hunger and Hydration form the basic needs and are pretty self explanatory. Rest is more of a "prestige" health requirement and will give players\NPCs performance boosts when given access to shelter, blankets and beds. Wounds\sickness can be the result of eating something nasty and or getting wounded.
Skills:
Skills are acquired through activities and experimentation or through learning from Players\NPCs. There are many skills but are acquired through just surviving (no grinding)  e.g. The ability to craft any item is a single skill.
Ideas:
You get "ideas" through doing activities the hard way.
e.g. Kill a few animals for food and get the idea for a club
Kill a few larger animals with a club and get the idea for a spear
Drink from a stream a couple of times and you might get the idea to make something to take the water with you.
"Ideas" are then turned into physical items by experimentation and will have prerequisites resulting in a tech tree.

Physical items will have refinement levels, resulting in better quality items. e.g. you craft a spear use it until it breaks, you craft another one which is better than the first etc.
Temperature extremes sap health - giving clothing and shelter greater purpose.

Game start example:
You start the game with nothing but the need to survive.
You need food and water to stay healthy, whilst avoiding animals that may want to hurt you. Your survey your surroundings and find a stream near by for drinkable water.
Deciding that this is as good as any place, you collect some sticks and by rubbing another two together eventually make a campfire. You build it up so that it will burn for a while.
Next job will be to forage for food. Wandering around you find several bushes with berries that may be edible, collecting these will sustain you for a couple of days before you'll need to find something more substantial.
On your travels you notice some animals around, rabbits mostly. You try to sneak up on a few, but are unsuccessful. However you saw some stones near the stream that you may be able to throw at the rabbits to kill one, this proves unsuccessful as well but it has given you an idea of making a ranged weapon - a sling.

Fast forward a bit, your sling got you by for a while and you were able to make some rudimentary clothes and a sleeping blanket from the skins but your hunting activities are taking most of the day so you are only barely staying ahead of your hunger. You've also learned that digging up a particular bush gains some good edible roots which resulted in an idea for a digging stick, and that the red berries with white spots make you sick. Perhaps it is time to move on, as the food is getting hard to find here now.

Fast forward a bit more: You are now taking down larger animals, which means you are now well fed. You can now make fire hardened spears and are working on making stone tips by bashing two stones together. Your garments are now looking much neater and you have constructed a hide shelter to sleep in, as a result of being well fed and well rested you now walk the land with speed and confidence. So much so, a man arrived yesterday and offered his services in exchange for food. You gave him food and shelter and taught him how to forage for vegetables, which he is now doing as you look for larger game. 

Eventually I'd like to take this idea through an extensive tech tree (think age of empires or settlers). The more advanced you become the more followers you'll attract.

THIS is the kind of survival game I'd want to play?

[yarnevk]

That game exists and is called Wurm, something the Minecraft dev did with a friend before he left preferring faster paced Minecraft game of 3-D blocks over Wurms slower skill based game based on 2.5D terrain.

http://wurmonline.com/

Development continued as beta for years and they just did 1.0 release a few months ago that had upgraded customized PC and animated mob models.

Everything  in the game beyond the environment is made by PCs using skills that take years to master.  You do not start in an fig leaf, you get a peasant tunic for modesty.   You also get a set of wooden noob survival tools that respawn with you, unless you choose to drop them and forage stone and sticks to make your own tools and fire.   

Mobs are hostile, many noobs make the mistake of thinking collect ten rat/wolf pelts is the first thing they can do like any RPG game, but that quest does not exist, and wolfs/rats will kill you for a long time.  Even if you can defeat those you have to watch out for huge lurking spiders/trolls hiding in the woods.

 It also has health, thirst, nutrition, hunger and rest.

The elevation map itself can be edited using a shovel to dig/drop dirt and hatchet/sickle to cut/plant trees bushes, or put in roads and farms (roads are simply textured tiles, not vectored deformations).   Of course older servers are more developed, and have neighbor conflicts, but newer servers come out as population grows, the PVE servers have become more popular than PVP in recent years.

Wurm would benefit greatly from Outerra, the dev environment is similar API of OpenGL/AL with Collada models.  The distant lands are simply textured elevation maps, basically what Outerra starts with, which is not very immerssive.  It uses animated sprites for grass, planned to be switched to geometric shaders.   

The main difference I see is algorithmically instanced trees vs. individually plantable/destructible trees, which Outerra has said is in the works.  The cool thing about all flora is they are living with each trees, bush and grass all having different growth stages & spread algorithms.   Time flow is 8x with seasons.   The only game I have ever played where you can actually be a forester that can change the forest.

The terrain model uses ocean connected isles (servers) of 2kx2k or even 4kx4k tiles, where tiles are probably 2mx2m.  So smaller and more detailed than earth, but all of the isles could be put on the same world if dynamically loaded like Outerra does for earth.

The only problem with the survival game is that phase does not last long, the newest server was restricted to new characters only for this reason to slow down development.  WIth metagaming forums and chats it is otherwise too easy to yell looking for village to meet the man giving you tools, food and a warm bed.   So the world cannot truly develop starting with the stone age simply because it is a MMO and different people have different play times and lengths, there will always be someone with more time and thus more skill.   Just like humanity skilling is an open tree, since it takes so long the main limit is time just like real life, so people tend to focus.

One possible way around this could be a multiverse where the same base terrain has different characters of different epochs all with different layers of terraforming, buildings, roads.   Then you just port to the epoch you prefer, from stone age to medieval to industrial.   

[mrsquish]

Hi Yarnevk,

Thanks mate, I'll check that out. I think I was initially turned off by not being able to host my own server. But everything else looks pretty good.

[yarnevk]

Head to Release its the newest server, still plenty of wild lands with mobs that will kill you.   I had not died in weeks and was filling smug on my deed, then I explored the desert, mountains and steppes for fun this weekend and died a handful of times.

There has been a request for a wilderness hunting server that cannot be deeded, looking forward to that.

Any other Wurmians here?  I have five alts now which is the email limit.  Every night and weekend since last fall.  Maybe we can drum up enough interest to get the mutual devs to check each other out, if nothing more than to import the map and show off what it would look like (though that would be a cheat since flying is not possible and in-game maps do not exist, only occasionally will they dump the current terrain map)