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Yonder - Sandbox MMO in PreAlpha

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Hey guys.

 

Posted about this a long time ago now, but significant progress since back then.

 

Yonder is a sandbox crafting MMO, similar to Wurm Online, played from an RPG-like perspective with a stylized world-design (Column-based tiles, rather than joined slopes or voxel-based, with extra world layers).

 

I'm the Lead Developer on the project, and as you can imagine a primary goal of ours is to highlight the game. Hence, here I am!

 

The game has started doing its personal blog updates to inform people about progress and upcoming changes, and the public-testing will be opening up around next month too.

 

The Facebook and Blog links are here:
 

https://www.facebook.com/InfiDesigns

 

http://yonderdev.blogspot.co.uk/

 

Sadly, our website is still being built so no website for the game for a few more weeks.

Would greatly appreciate people checking it out to see the few pre-alpha pieces that are up and staying tuned!

 

I can also answer any questions about it on this post too.

 

po57NQLl.jpg

 

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jInpcMjb3zI

 

Pre-Alpha Stress Test  Now Finished

 

On Saturday at 7.30PM UK Time we'll be having a stress-test to mark the ending of the Pre-Alpha and it's a public invitation to join us there (Some developers will be on as well) to just check it out in its current Pre-alpha state. We'll be posting to the Facebook page and blog before-hand to give links and more info (See links above) so stay tuned there if you're interested!

 

The stress-test went quite well with a fair few people joining and some people even built forts, named them, and tried waging war on each other! (All made out of dirt, as well)

 

We're moving onto Alpha now, and we have thanks for those who helped us test the pre-alpha. We're considering more regular server-uptime now too.

Edited by Traslogan
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Will it have servers like wurm or custom ones made by players like minecraft?

I personally rly like the #1 type, and will you try to build same kind of volunteer team like wurn has.

For example forum mods, chat mods, game masters.

Also were u a arch/lead GM in wurm.

Anyway looks interesting and wish you best of luck in developing, hope that old excisting games will also work as an inspiration in the background

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Will it have servers like wurm or custom ones made by players like minecraft?

I personally rly like the #1 type, and will you try to build same kind of volunteer team like wurn has.

For example forum mods, chat mods, game masters.

Also were u a arch/lead GM in wurm.

Anyway looks interesting and wish you best of luck in developing, hope that old excisting games will also work as an inspiration in the background

 

 

In order of questions:

It will be servers similar to wurm in that we open up more based on demand, and they are made by developers (Or potentially some kind of world-generation, but that would be very long-term). Our current plan was that we could split up PvP and PvE with the areas of servers, but the ability to flow freely between them would exist also (rather than separate server-systems). We considered the idea that we could let players submit designs for maps that we could then recreate into the game for new servers, but that would still be long-term and a challenge.

 

As for creating a volunteer moderation team, yes of course we will. It's basically the only option without a AAA budget. Chat mods may not be present, save for perhaps server-chats, but the rest would be up to players ignoring or using the chat channels they prefer.

 

As for Lead GM, no I was no. I was a Community-Mod and Forum-Mod back in the day for a couple of years, but I never actually became a GM before I decided to retire from that.

 

And thanks, we're hoping to bring more attention to the project overtime starting from the first public Alphas sometime next month!

 

 

In response to Ascorbic, we're creating it in Unity, however the server system is completely custom-coded to give us more control in how we balance out processing-workload across server areas.

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Think "mobile" as you design.


 


Awesome to see more companies going after this space.  Best of luck to you!


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Love the pvp and pve areas together idea.

Maybe pvp zones inside pve map where people travel to fight.

Also +1 on unity :) really interested to see how you make it.

If you get forums running, i might be around. Add simple stuff like suggestions+general chat sections ^^

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Think "mobile" as you design.

 

Awesome to see more companies going after this space.  Best of luck to you!

Think Mobile? As in development for mobile? But....I don't wanna! *throws tantrum*

 

 

To Silakka: Thanks again. Not sure about the idea of PvP zones, but we were open to the suggestion of guild-battles (Guilds being like Alliances in Wurm. Would be like organized warfare in small factions since groups of settlements could go to war).

 

 

As for forums, well we do have them, but we're currently still just patching it up into working order and it's hardly completed, but it is there:

 

http://infinitus-designs.com

http://infinitus-designs.com/forum/

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Good luck with the development :) Can you explain what column based tiles are? 

 

 

Column-based tiles is where the world is a tile-based system, but you can not place cubes on top of each other, like minecraft, and there are no slopes like Wurm Online. Instead, you are simply raising and lower platforms, which you might see can look a little creative and stylized, if you see the images on the Facebook page or blog.

 

The player has the ability to simply walk over each column when they are flat or very close to each other's height, and in the long run we'll offer methods of getting over *and* making use of high-height columns for things like stairs or even taking cover in PvP.

 

We let players access features like mining, however, by offering multi-layer worlds where the player must create a way of getting between them, aka a mine-shaft in this case.

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If you need bug testers, you know how good we Wurmians are at breaking things, ;)

 

I recently broke a pretty large MMO......  and received a "thank you" instead of a ban. Â¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Stupid ability "glitches"

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Well we'll be putting video footage up for highlighting features throughout Alpha, but none this month I'm afraid.


 


 


As for testing, the alpha will be public. At first it may be exclusive times only, but when I get our new server package it'll probably be up and running 24/7 for testing by anyone.


 


 


We'll post most of our updates on the DevBlog and on our Facebook page, as linked in the original post. All I ask is to stay tuned for now! :D


Edited by Traslogan
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Very eager to see some gameplay video whenever you are ready to show some off :D

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Also waiting on the video

Will be awesome looking back when it starts going far and more complex.

This smells like a freshly baked piece of bread

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Also waiting on the video

Will be awesome looking back when it starts going far and more complex.

This smells like a freshly baked piece of bread

 

Freshly baked bread...

 

 

I swear, I'm gonna bake it and I'm gonna bake it good *Immature developer moment #20194*

 

 

 

Yeah I'm looking forward to further down the line too. I want to play my own game and experience what other players take from it as well.

*starts adding butter and jam to slices of the loaf*

 

As the weeks/months go by I'll be going around a lot of forums to help begin our push for publicity, but I will try and keep as many as I can posted with updates on videos etc. However, the PR-pro-wannabe within me says you'll have much better luck keeping up if you like the Facebook page :P

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We officially tested our regrowth-system on the server today though. Was rather...interesting.

 

We sped up the process to help us judge how the server handles generating forests dynamically as trees age up and die off and spread out new trees.

 

The result:
 

The trees reached a 2x2km world-map edge inside a couple of minutes. Ultimately we generated around 21,000 trees.

 

"gg" - Server's last words before throwing NullReferenceException at me.

 

 

Some changes later, we do officially have regenerating forests now. \o/

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This looks good, best of luck with development.


 


I'll be following this thread, you should post updates for the Wurm community in here. 


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I know its really early to ask but how you woul handle the payment?

Becouse one thing i allways didnt like on wurm is that you need to pay extra for a "settlement" and maybe you can handly it like xyson (thats really the only good thing at that game ;-) ) and everyone gets a "free settlement" and it will grow larger at the rate people joining it. In that way you also increase the point where people have to play together.

Greets bier

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Payments? Well I've always been fond of the idea of monthly-subscriptions if the service is worth it, but I'm also aware that so many gamers no longer consider monthly-subs to be a good thing.


 


Realistically we'd be Free-To-Play with some level of marketplace-store and/or premium subscription. I wouldn't want to go into pay-to-win territory via a marketplace. It would be centered around aesthetics if it was implemented.


 


One idea we're going with atm is a Runescape-style system where a great deal of the game is F2P but there is a slightly different design in the premium-side of the game. This would mean that we could do things like F2P getting settlements, but potentially having it be a bit tougher (Because, well, it's F2P I'm afraid). Meanwhile Premiums would have a separate server-group they can use that run a lot of the mechanics slightly differently, whilst some late-game content would be premium-exclusive.


 


On top of that, we thought it would still be okay to let premiums journey to the F2P worlds and play, but they'd be subject to the design-rules of the F2P servers.


Admittedly it means that free-players do not get the full experience, which is a shame, but we also have to be realistic in that we must operate a business-model on top of a good gaming experience, so it will be a lot of balancing to make sure they don't feel left out but that premium is still worthwhile as well.


 


As for paying for money: No.


I don't like that. The only real-money purchase of in-game stuff I really like is the idea of PLEX in EVE online or the similar system that runescape has now. I think that keeps the in-game economy intact whilst still offering dedicated players the chance to earn some extra features if they work hard for it.


 


Not sure if I've drifted off on a tangent or if I just answered very accurately. Your choice :P


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Realistically we'd be Free-To-Play with some level of marketplace-store and/or premium subscription. I wouldn't want to go into pay-to-win territory via a marketplace. It would be centered around aesthetics if it was implemented.

Be careful with item shop, it often starts as "decorative items only" and ends with "items required to play" when initial hype is over and only "loyal" players stay - this is decreasing flow of new players and therefore slowly killing the game as experienced players will quit sooner or later as well.

That's why I prefer premium/P2P system - you NEED to pay to actually enjoy the game, but everyone have equal chances and game don't scare new players with overpowered item shop. :)

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Well as mentioned, my current favorite is F2P *and* P2P. 

The idea, as it stands, is that premium would have its own servers / worlds that they can journey between on one side of the game-world. In the middle of the game world would be PvP-servers where both free and premium players can play (Although some kind of balancing would be required to mix them properly, unless we opted for game-mode-PvP like in World of warcraft and other games). On the other side of the PvP-worlds, we'd have the Free-to-play servers.

Premiums could cross to the F2P world but would not be able to access premium-exclusive content whilst there. 

 

I currently favor the idea of limitations to skills and game-areas for F2P, but I think I'd let them have an unrestricted combat skill range so that they are on better footing against Premiums in PvP.

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Another nother nother sandbox game. Looks like it is in really early development still.


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Well...yes...


 


The title does say "PreAlpha".


 


It goes into Alpha next month, and we start on bigger features. Right now we're focusing on the infrastructure.


Need to have the support to build the better content, after all.


 


 


When we start going into Alpha, I'll start putting info up about some mid-term roadmaps for the course of development, to help people see our overall direction for the game.


Edited by Traslogan

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