Re: [ANN] Townforge - a Norse-themed crypto-MMO/city-sim game (testnet)
Year 953 (third week of v0.27 testnet) has dawned upon Townforge. Helsengaard, its founding city, has grown to be a sprawling city of level 3, allowing 2 city specializations. Rumor has it that some of the players are saving money to found a second city, with the current cost of 2nd city sitting at roughly 144k TFG (to give perspective, I currently own 80k "liquidity" in gold, and built an expensive 300 Economical Power commercial building that cost me well over 50k just now):
Advent of testnet v0.27 brought us new eager players, and I wanted to highlight three in particular; Powis Belorc, Aren Erand Hegeweard, joined by Dorik in building their very own city district.
To welcome them, I built a road leading from the main city square to their own city district. I'm currently working on a video to showcase how I used premade 32x32 VOX building blocks to quickly build a road leading to their district; but the results can be seen in-game:
Powis and the others have embarked on a task to start their own production of higher tier materials. Here's a glimpse of Belorc's quarry right at the entrance:
Their city district is full of fine details, which I find inspiring. Even the roads are not bland slabs; here's a highlight on some of the dercorations Dorik's done for roads:
Aren's been a very prolific builder, with extremely fine details in many of his/her buildings. Many of them are build inside the buildings, so it's hard to capture them if not on video - for example the castle holds many intriguing details within its walls. Here's an example of creative melding of multiple lots together; the castle is to the top-left, flawlessly connects to a stone quarry in the middle segment, with a bridge leading to the sawmill to the right. All of them built with fine details allowing 1st person walker mode exploration:
A lot of details are hidden inside the buildings, as exemplified here via a glimpse from the door at Dorik's Golden Horseshoe Inn:
I haven't been sitting idle either. My biggest in-game feat this past week was creation of new 64x64 pixel art to my very own pixel art museum. This piece is called the 'Bloodmoon' (yes, it's made manually with in-game tools - I might make it into a video as I have the footage of its construction):
What is intriguing also for us, is that as the game progresses, we - the creators - also learn of our own game and its emergent economy. Given the question "how much is a Sapphire worth"? No clue, out of the blue. It's a special item that can be mined via a random chance by stonecutters, if the stonecutter lies on top of a gem vein. It gives a bonus to prestige, which will result in subsidies every game tick (i.e. every 360 blocks). But what is the worth of it? A lot of factors play into it, and there's no correct answer; same with patents, which I priced based on my initial investment (and giving lenience naturally, as we're experimenting on economical balance in the testnet):
... and naturally, all the presented constructions, market transactions, special game events, and even game communication (via non-mineable txes) are part of the blockchain. Oh yeah, and by achieving milestones in the game ("badges"), you can unlock the seen new materials and these custom chat colours, etc.
Perhaps in the next game year (corresponding roughly to a real-life week depending on block discovery rate) we'll see a second city rising in the testnet! Winter's cold, food is running low - hopefully everybody's stocked up on vegetables, grain, and (salted) meat, lest we see Helsengaard shrink in population and the 2nd city's viability become but a fleeting dream...
Tech-wise, we saw advent of v0.27.0.6, which fixed a bug related to network splintering.
-Syksy Syyskuu