Where are the games for roleplayers


Many are successful. I am going to start posting games that I think role-players would like to try. A few are out already and some are coming soon.

Travelers Book is a game that focuses on character creation, with similarity to pen and paper games in the way they do this. The art is beautiful and they include tools to inspire your vision of your character. I know little about the game itself. Voice and chat will be available but they also adding many emotes that can be used to communicate. Sounds cool to me!

Here is the link to the website and the youtube video. I suggest taking a look at it. One thing I might steal is the in-game journal, something I have always wanted in our game. Steal is not the right word and I plan to use it as inspiration…which was of course, part of Adellion’s design.

Others have shared with me several games that have thriving role play communities, including Final Fantasy, ESO, Conan, LOTR, and probably more than I know.

Feel free to send me any games you know that fit into this category or even a short review of the role play.

Yes, we are working on the game. As I posted on our FB page, I broke my foot. Good thing is one can work at a desk with a broken foot. Bad thing is sleeping in a huge boot does not provide a comfortable night so I am tired and a little brain dead.

We are close to finishing a client job and moving on to the next. In the meantime I will get back to designing the in game world.

Teila

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Pure Roleplay….should we?


Also on FB page.

So, I have been spending time talking to role players, mostly ESO role players but also others who have role played on other games, on both regular servers and role play servers. I have gotten a lot of information from some very passionate people.

Most of them tell me the same thing. They do not care at all about mechanics. They play the game just to get what they need to role play. So they use mechanics to gather resources and craft and decorate houses.

Other than that, they do not want combat mechanics. They do not care about min/maxing or questing or any of what you expect in your average MMO.

So what do they want? A true sandbox.

I have spent a year a year or more now playing with several groups of role players on ESO. On my very first mission I found myself swinging my sword at invisible mobs. I was very confused. DM gave great descriptions about the monsters coming out of the swamp. It reminded me more of a DnD pen and paper game than an MMO, but…with no dice. The game play was completely consensual, one could end up falling into the swamp (via DM description) and then the player emotes that they clawed there way back onto dry land. I also played with a group that did use dice and the roll was meaningful to your actions which you then emoted. So rolled a 20 and I saved the captain of the group from getting killed.

I found two groups..one that likes dice, one that does not. I enjoyed both…and I admit that the dice surprised me more than the emote from the DM but still lots of fun.

Our game currently has been built as a regular mechanics heavy MMO with battles between different cultures and among nobles and houses. As our game has always been skewed to role players with no numbers at all and a huge amount of lore.

I came to realize that it will be impossible for heavy mechanics vs role play to exist in the same world. Yes, ESO does it, and many people play the game as intended. Imagine a Sala siege where the Populists attack the homes of the royalist nobles. The event could announce as Only Pure Roleplay, with dice. Or without dice, or with combat mechanics. This would be confusing and require three different events. I had another idea maybe to put them each in different instances. But again, is one world, so having three different outcomes will not be able to affect the world.

I sat down with my team members and we made a decision. We will create LoA for pure roleplayers and include some light mechanics for crafting and resource gathering and house building. We will add some mechanics to support role play with or without dice.

This will mostly affect combat mechanics as rather than the computer driving the combat, it will be the players and their Dms and their own missions. Death is consensual so a player can choose to die or not. Role play groups can create their own rules concerning death and injuries.

Of course all of this will be tested thoroughly with players in a portion of the map. If we find many people who prefer the mechanics we can create a second shard using what we have now and adding the latest changes. However, that will not happen unless we feel it is worth the time.

So one thing we will doing in the next few months is sending out surveys to gather more information from people interested in LoA. I will posting it here and sending to some game guilds where I have contacts. I would appreciate you filling those out regardless of whether you are a role player or a “gamer”. Feel free to send me feedback.

Apart from that, in a few weeks we will be moving into our new bigger and better office. I am excited about that and I think it will help us moving forward to have more space and equipment. Now that I can see again, I can finish my client work (which helps fund the game) and move on to finishing the starting area.

I am saving some surprises for the testers, such as some already finished rp features that we have added.

If you made it through this post, thanks! If you are a role player….feel free to add your opinions.

Teila

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Old Forums


Hi everyone!

Here to tell everyone that the old forums are gone. I tried to keep them but did not have enough time to spend trying to keep away spam and keep up with manual updates.

We have moved to a new host and are in the process of putting up a new website for the game which will include new forums.

We also have a small Discord channel with a handful of gamers. If you want a link to the discord channel or to the Facebook page, please let me know.

And if you are from the Adellion forums and are in contact with some of the former people from there, please send them here.

Those of you who are not interested in being part of the development community and prefer to wait, that is fine as well. I will be opening up Disord to roleplayers soon.

Hope everyone is well in these trying times and keep safe.

Teila

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We Have Music!


Maybe not a big deal…but to me it is. I commissioned original music from Royal Ruto Studios.

This was our first big commission and I am sure many more to come. While I have artists and programmers and me….but none of us had the skill to make music like this. I also hope to have some music from one of our Adellion pals who makes beautiful music too.

So..why is this a big deal to me? Because we are using the art studio funds now to add to our game, to pay talented people do things we cannot do. It means that our time can be spent doing the actual work on the game and not looking through piles of free music for something that sort of sounds okay.

The composer worked with me on getting the song just right and I think it perfectly represents a world of humans from different cultures, coming together for peace and war and trade.

So here it is! Remember this is a copyrighted song and cannot be used in your YouTube videos or games. I hope you will enjoy it.

My next step is to finish a new map, yes, something less rectangular and then set up a fancy lore page for all that fabulous writing we have to show off. Wiki\s are great for development but I want everyone to see the talented Adellion writers in a nice showcase as well as introduce you to the world of Aryiure.

In the meantime, click on the link below to hear a beautiful piece of music.

Teila · Voices Of Aryiure

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Everquest 20 years


Who can forget their very first MMORPG experience?  For some reason, I skipped UO, probably because I had young kids and no time to play games. Possibly it is because I loved text games, and could not give up the ability to IMAGINE a beautiful world in my mind for a world that was, well, a little too low poly. Of course, I did not know the word poly back then and had no idea that those graphics would someday be outdated.

So I entered this new world full of magic and fantasy creatures. I played an elf, of course. I like elves and they seem elegant and lovely.  So my first visit consisted of me walking around on some wooden docks and falling into the water, over and over again. And dying and then trying again.  I was getting used to navigating in a 3d environment, a very new experience for me. I also fell out off the ramps that ran around the trees. Frustrated, I almost left the game.

But months later, I will still running around the world, banging into the loading areas when your character went still…hiccup…and then runs again. I met a few people and killed stuff and mostly explored. It was so cool.

Life has a way of drawing you back. A new baby kept me busy and I was busy with the other kids’ school. I did not totally give up games, but I played them a lot less. Over the years, I played Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, and now ESO with my son and husband. Each had their own magic, their own immersive style that drew me in. I liked some more than others and I still miss the exploration in the old games where you did not have to die so much to look around and take in the sights.

Today, I make games and 3d environments. We have clients and I work with other game developers. The graphics our team makes today totally blows the ones in the old first EQ.

One thing though that I will never get from a game again, especially an MMO, that feeling when for the first time you enter a world full of others, a world that is full of surprises. Today, the games are not as wondrous, they are faster, less time to ponder, less time to see the amazing work the artists and programmers and others accomplished. Today we expect more. It takes so much more to amaze us.

20 years. Here’s to EQ, and may they have another 20 years. 🙂

Teila

 

 

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Medieval Monday: Merchant Ships


Ships and trade! Great information for your medieval game or novel. #indiedev #gamedev #mmorpg

Allison D. Reid

medieval-cog2While many crops and other goods were able to be moved by hand, or by using animal-drawn carts, boats were also an important mode of transportation in the Middle Ages. They could bear larger and heavier loads, and allowed merchants to trade over long distances. They brought goods into the medieval world from exotic places, sparking a desire for shorter, less difficult passages, which eventually led to world exploration. There were a variety of ships built and used in the Middle Ages, and there isn’t enough space in this post to explore them all. For today, I’m going to focus on those used by merchants, since they had the most impact on daily life.

medieval-cogFor Northern Europe, the Cog was a standard merchant ship—though more accurately, it was a general term used for a variety of ships that had similar attributes. Cogs were built small at first, but with need…

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World Building with new perspectives


I found this article by Mimi Mondal on the HindustanTimes website. Fascinating look at how fiction has perpetuated real world stereotypes even  when it makes no sense to do so. I will leave you to read the article. Very interesting.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/all-worldbuilding-without-exception-is-political/story-iE1Gc0R4ULSq8khLaJ1dEO.html?fbclid=IwAR30xxbVieYH_t601bR507_JTxf9nP4K0hHSLALSuNm6Y59t_LCnGunB-zo

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Big move and new client


moving

 

The past 6 months have been crazy. We have made a huge move from Florida to New Jersey. This means leaving our house of many years, packing it all up, driving 2 days with kids, 4 cats and a dog, and then trying to fit all of our stuff in a smaller house.

Finally our office is set up and we are done with the first part of a job with a client so we can concentrate on our games. I have also decided to learn a bit of code since Unity is adding visual scripting and I want to be able to use it myself rather than depending on others to do all the code. I have learned that as great as visual scripting may be, if you do not understand what you need and why you need it then it does not work that well. So the non-programmers on the team are working together to learn some code. Not nearly as exciting as building worlds, but I am beginning to see some use for this code stuff. 🙂

In the meantime, I am building up our database of items for the game. I a lot of spreadsheets to build.  Adding all the objects, effects, etc., to the database is tedious but very important. Once we have that, we can actually start setting up our game. Level design is the fun part after all.

Now that we are settled I will post some more here and on the Unity forums.  The outside work with our client will take time but it will also help fund our project which is a big bonus. 🙂

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Medieval Monday: Undergarments


As we work at modeling period appropriate clothing for our characters, I found this very timely. Interesting article on the clothing we never think about in games. 🙂

via Medieval Monday: Undergarments

 

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Medieval Monday: Insults


via Medieval Monday: Insults

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