Why are you planning on making certain areas unavailable? Is it just because they are landmarks?
Because we want to use them later in game for special areas. For example, once we make the city generator, we want to have the large cities from the past present as ruins, with high concentration of things-that-want-to-kill-ya. One could choose the difficulty by how far from these one settles.
But that's for the final released game, and maybe for the alpha period we should just allow the whole world, and reset it or create a new realm for the release, though not everyone will like it so I guess.
Also how big of an area do you think players will be able to choose from the start? What will new players do when the entire Earth has been claimed, even though I would imagine that would take a VERY long time anyways. Maybe then you could add in the moon and Mars to be colonised?
That's open to consideration. The world is divided to tiles, and the usual tile we are using for various purposes in the engine is L12 which is roughly 2446m by the side. That is close to 6km².
Earth's land surface is 148,940,000 km², out of which the
agricultural land is 48,836,976 km², making it 8,162,738 tiles where one can gather food, or 24,894,215 tiles total.
Now how much one can get? If we take the maximum number of players there could be, we could proportionally divide the area and get some limit. But more logical is to assume it will not be proportionally divided. Every player should get a certain starting number of tiles, and by growing economically he should be able to capture additional chunks, or, if he doesn't play, the chunks will be freed.
But since we don't have the numbers, we can only find it through the alpha/beta stage. So I guess for alpha we set the initial number somewhat higher, and adjust later.
Anyway, it's quite unlikely that the land would run out. Adding Moon and Mars is more likely to happen because of the "because we can" effect
And any hints on what the prototype vehicles are going to be?
The prototype vehicles are for the freely registered users to experience some driving/piloting in addition to free ufo-style flying around. There should be two - probably the truck and an aircraft.
They are called
prototype because, you know, our engineers had to fit various instruments there and consequently the gas tank had to be shrunk, you know, so you'll have to fill it from a canister every 15min or so. Sorry about that
People who bought the game will get normal, non-prototype vehicles, and a wider variety of them.
As always, everything is subject to change.