Pet loyalty:
Neglecting your pets or feeding them alfalfa results in displeasure. Displeasure leads to fun things when the player tries to log out. Reversing displeasure via items or such prevents fun things from happening.
Coup/Fun things:
If half or more pets are displeased, they will attempt to remove the player. Success odds are 1/10*number of displeased pets. Failure results in the displeased pets running away.
Player removal:
Can result from displeased pets or other players. The account is terminated and items and pets are lost if the cause of removal is a coup. If a player attempts removal of another and succeeds, they get all the items and pets belonging to that player. Unsuccessful removal results in the criminal being removed instead.
Pets with positive loyalty may be brought along to assist in removal, but may be lost in battle.
Alfalfa:
Alfalfa is an item that will make your pet displeased. May be fed to your own or someone else’s pets.
Theft:
A pet taken from another player by any means get their loyalty reset to neutral. Pets can be taken “peacefully” via theft or via “removal” of the owner.
Guarding:
Pets with positive or neutral loyalty will guard the player from attacks. The more pets the better. The formula to determine this is not yet decided. Pets may be lost in defending the player.
I wonder if it’d be a good idea to have some kind of goal in the game, or several goals such as:
- owning a certain number of rare pets at one time (3? 5?)
- owning a certain amount of in-game currency
Achieving a goal earns you a spot in the hall of fame (probably forever?). They should be hard enough that very few can achieve them ever.
Not really related, but I think it would be fun to have a hall of shame. Every player death within the month(?) is listed there as well as the cause of death.
The amount of days the player has stayed alive for is going to be recorded, if this is possible to implement with what I have.
How about a deterrent to keep someone from just ganking a lot of other player, causing them to build up a boatload of critters. As it stands, it sounds like "gather an army and steamroll everyone" is a valid strategy. Maybe having more critters speeds up the rate at which they get displeased?
Player erasure is definitely supposed to be a little bit discouraged. I have some ideas, idk how good they are though:
Pet loyalty with pets that have been taken by force will be (current loyalty)*(-1). That way pets that really liked their owners will be displeased with the current one, and vice versa.
Players are invisible to each other by default, you can’t visit another player unless you’ve gotten information via a spy pet or some other way.
Living players that have attempted to commit crimes will be placed on a public wanted list with a bounty placed on them. Anyone can visit their page and do things to them (success not guaranteed). Erasing wanted players can be done without getting placed on a wanted list.
If one wishes, one can announce their presence to other players without committing a crime.
Greetings, Tusslers! Enjoying the beta? Unfortunately, this week, I’ve been out of commission due to a sudden illness, but I’m better now! This means that the original plan for this week didn’t wind up getting finished, so I can’t write about it. I would still like to have something up today, so I figured that, instead, I’d like to do a bit of a blog post on what we have planned for TUSSLE going forward.
Keep in mind, these are all tentative, and in addition to bug fixing and engine improvements, which will always be coming. Most of these are focused around the community, and content creation. Without further disclaimer, here’s a few of the big bullet points we’re trying to hit:
The Character Builder
The thing that people have been asking for, and one of the big advertised features of the game. The characters have been designed to have a few relatively basic interchangeable parts, which would make scripting them fairly easy. If you were a brawl modder back in the day and are familiar with PSA, this might be familiar for you. The program will be a visual interface, showing the current frame and any active hitboxes while you modify the action in a side pane. The subactions you can take will be selectable from a list, which contains things like changing animation frames, changing and setting variables, activating and deactivating hitboxes, and nearly every line you’ve seen in Hitboxie’s move set.
I am currently working on writing the subaction system, it’s almost in place, but is missing just the last few steps to tie them with the existing action system. Once that is done, a code-free action script will be shortly after that. And after that, the visual character builder! Projected timeline for this is about two months for the full builder.
The Module Repository
Right now, this website is just a blog, but, in the future, I hope to have a website that can hold characters and stages, and allow players to upload their own creations to share. Modules could be tagged and searched for, as well as rated and commented on. Once the website is up, an API would be set up to even allow you to access the module repository in-game!
Hopefully, by the time we get the builder up and running, we will have the funding to maintain a server for this endeavor, which will probably only take a few weeks to implement.
Custom Content
One of the pie-in-the-sky dreams I’ve had for TUSSLE is to be a sort of “Indie Smash Bros” title. As such, we hope to reach out to holders of various indie IPs and ask permission to add characters, stages, and items to the game. This is where you come in! If we can show these people that there is a vibrant and active community for this game, we can give them a reason to say yes when we ask them. So, if you want to see characters from your favorite indie titles in TUSSLE, keep sharing the links!
Remember, Project TUSSLE is first and foremost about you, the players. We hope you enjoy it, and we hope you’ll stick around for a proper feature update next week! Until next time, Tusslers!
I found another great script. Once the Spellblade joins the party, a new option will open up: Item crafting. You can access the crafting area from any open air map by calling down an airship(This also opens up the fast travel system so you can immediately fly to any town you’ve already visited). Once there, you can craft items from the odds and ends you collect from monsters.
Is the site compatible with a mobile web browser? That would be amazingly awesome if it were. If it's not I understand. Either way it's really really helpful already so thank you for making it. You're like the xkit guy jr.! luv, -sothh =============== Hey there! The tracker can currently be accessed on a mobile browser. However, it doesn't behave well and looks pretty crappy. One of the items on my list of planned improvements is to add a mobile version of the site or a mobile app (possibly both); I'll probably be diving into this sometime next month. My life is rather hectic right now between a crazy-hard grad school class, work, and preparing to move, but come June I will have a lot more time to resume active development on new features, so keep an eye out for announcements! I keep a running list of planned improvements on the tracker help page and am always open to suggestions. And thanks so much for the kind words; I'm glad you're getting good use out of it! (And being compared to the guy who did xkit just makes me do all sorts of happy flails. :) ) ~Tracker-mun
It's time to talk about the public alpha release! You know that it exists, but we haven't said too much about what's actually in it. I'm here to furnish you with some screenshots, as well as a video of some sweet sweet grameplay and a little info about our vision for the final game.
In the alpha, you'll be introduced to our protagonist, Tavish Gordon, the Watchman (one of our early enemies) and an NPC named Ms. Sweepy. Ms. Sweepy is essentially a steampunk Roomba, but she plays an important role in the final game.
Save me, Tavish Gordon! You're my only hope.
A lot of work went into putting it the HUD together, and it will only be evolving in functionality as the game moves forward. That central console? It's going to be kind of amazing* some day not so far off. Taking damage on your health odometer may look choppy at the moment, but that's because right now enemy attacks do preset damage. The wheel is actually extremely granular.
It's a tarp!
Why should you play the final version of Greywater when it's released? You can think of it as Diablo envisioned for the modern world. We've learned a lot over the years as a species, and games have become ever more complex and feature-rich. It's also going to be a witty*, charming* romp through a beautiful* and storied* steampunk world.
Greywater will borrow elements from puzzle games, point and click adventures and modern RPGs. Everything we can do to make the game a wonderful, memorable experience on a budget and a realistic schedule, we'll do.
Here's a video of gameplay from the alpha. It's largely the same content as you'll be experiencing when you play the build, so if you want to be surprised, you may just want to wait a few days. That said, it features some of the awesome work by our composer Chris, so maybe do watch it but with your eyes closed?
The final game will feature a simple, yet elegantly robust crafting system, an item-based ability system* and a very unique currency system. It will have a linear plot with a side-quest* system. None of that pointless MMO-style quest bullhonkery. We don't want want you to kill six snow moose.
The way we've envisioned it, the game's plot spans three medium-length acts. Obviously at this point in development a lot is still up in the air, but we have a great deal of the final game's functionality and content planned out already. You may have inferred as much by putting together our team moniker and the disclosure of our beloved wheeled friend.
As we prepare to release the alpha, we are beginning to look for additional talent to crank up the rate of development on the project. So if you're a fabulous pixel, concept, or storyboard artist, or a programmer, we want you! Skype and a microphone is a must. This is a labor of love (we are all starving artists), so there won't be any monetary compensation until a successful Kickstarter much later in development. If all that sounds grood to you, get in touch with us and send us your work! Email us, tweet us, or even tumble at us (if that's a real thing and you think we'll see it amidst the sea of gifs).
We were planning to delay the release of the alpha build until it ran as smoothly on Mac OSX, but we've discovered that will require us to move from standard Java to Libgdx, so that's going to take at least the better part of November. Instead, we're going to be releasing the Windows build very soon. Like, super soon.
This may seem like we're leaving Mac users out in the cold, but its really only the lazy ones. Are you a Mac user like me? Use Bootcamp or install Parallels/VMware. Boom. Your Steam library will thank you. You can try running the Java file on OSX, but you're going to be a sad panda.
