Updated:

Saturday, February 11, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Team:

Myself

BlazingShadow

Latest Update:

We have finished up the Main Menu, settings menu, and the server can now successfully log you in. We are currently working on the character creation screen, and will be posting a "This weekend's progress" in our development journal tomorrow! This week by far as been the most productive in a long time.

Estimated cost:

Free, we don't want this to cost you a cent, and to promote that; we won't be having membership, or in game store; everything is free and can be obtained in the game. We might press a "Please donate" message here and there, but that's expected from a free to play game. We are hoping that by making the game free, fun to play, expansive, and good looking, we can gather fans looking to see our next game which has already started its planning stages.

Minimum Specs:

Running and older pc myself, I am hoping that if I can run it so can you, however there are two things that you must be able to support:

Resolution: 800x600 compatible

Bit Depth: 16 compatible

Game Information:

General

The game is a two dimensional (2D) isometric game. The graphics are done by hand in Microsoft paint, and are constantly edited to match and to look professional or so that they all look our best. The graphics are themed to look nice and simple, as well as showing you that hand done pixel art still as a place within the game world. The game features server based online, the game works as a world simulator its realism begging players to think before they do and to do thinks like you would in real life.

The Menus:

The menus will now be made in a long series of making, and then testing in full screen until we decide the the overall look isn't too large and looks nice but not over done, many of the menus will require you to double click key buttons such as the log in button and the delete button to ensure this is truly what you want.

Server:

We want the player to be aware of everything we are, we will be using a scale to rate "server lag." Server lag is lag generated by the server hosts slow internet or slowness due to the number of players accessing the server. When we detect server lag we will update out scale, that ranges from slight to unplayable. If we feel that it may get to unplayable or this may be a coding error, the server will have a 1 hour till shutdown timer set. When this happens a backup is created, tested for corruption and all user accounts are gone through to ensure it wasn't a cheating or hacking attempt. We will then test the server hosts computer speed and see what we can do. If we do determine it is the server host we will have to find someone willing to host it or, try out best to improve server performance, so some server lag may be deemed "Static". If server lag is static we will put a recommended player count and all players above said count will be warned of server lag tolerance.

Character Creation:

All accounts will be allowed three characters, all and any of which can be deleted at anytime. Character creation for our alpha will probably be limited to three body types for each gender and four hair colors. We will have character portraits for you to choose from; these change on what your wearing on your head of course. A new character will start off with what we consider enough resources to last three days of in game time. As well as immunity to animal attacks for these three days. This does not stop player killing however so beware! (read below about death to see why!) Character creation will involve a menu with simple text and then the button-scroll-bar interface option (an example will be showed in this weeks video). You will also be able to choose a name, weather you want to camp with friends or alone, and if you want to set a code for your friends to join you with (changeable later as well)

Character Selection:

When you reach the character selection Menu you will see a menu with VERY large buttons. The four buttons on the right signify the three characters you have to choose from and the log out button, Logging out when take you back to the main menu, the three characters are just left of a much large wood panel I have nick names "The Information dock". At the information dock you will see nothing until you click one of your characters, then the information dock will be filled with little tid-bits of information everything from health, to hunger, and head shot, to terrain description!

Experience:

Now here is an idea that might take you a minute to wrap your head around! Experience will be universal so none of those "My woodcutting level is..." game chatter. Doing anything productive will grant you experience, but its our unique boost system that makes the game interesting! Lets say you just got the skill Lumber jacking. When you first cut down a tree you will get lets say 25 experience. Now lets say you keep chopping down trees, eventually you'll notice a change, instead of getting 25 experience your getting 28, then 30, 34, 36, all the way to 50 right? You're still chopping them at the same speed though so this is mostly just for use on other skills. However, after a while at 50 experience per tree, you'll see it go down (Oh no!) This is when you've chopped so many trees you're character has started to "master" the art of chopping trees, now while your experience is going down your speed is going up! You can now chop a tree in 50% of time time and now the quality of the wood is 200% higher! Now this is all nice and dandy but what happens when we reach 25 experience again? well we level off now you have better speed and quality and you get the normal amount of experience. But the system doesn't stop there! if you go lets say 2 months without chopping not a single tree your character will start to forget key pointers in the art of chopping and thus you will gain more experience again but reduced quality and speed. This is to simulate the real-life way of learning.

Death:

This is not a game for those who don't think about what they do in a game, and think they can use cunnning to get out fo every situation. Death in Dukandia is death there is no coming back. But!, do not fret we have a system to at least give your new character a head start in the game. If your character dies you will see a new menu in the character creation screen. It will be a small box in the corner. When you expand it you will have the choice to gain Spiritual Wisdom from your previous ancestor. (the dead character) If you do this. Your new character will gain 75% of his overall Experience, his 'spawn' location, friends list, and 20% of his stats. You can use the Experience to skip the skills you originally got on him but then realized you din't need and much more so, its almost pure gain. However you must remember, that you got killed and if it was by a player, they might be lurking around.

Friends:

Dukandia when you create a character you can spawn randomly or near a friend! just type in his or her name and you will spawn near their spawn location. Spawn locations are marked by a purple flower. This flower turns dark blue when they are offline, and a purple one when they are online. The blue flower can be moved simply by getting its seed (regenerates every 24 in game hours) and planting it. The new point will instantly be your spawn location with its own flower, you then can remove the old flower. You can also teleport to your spawn point at anytime with a five min reload time.

Structure, craft, and material creation:

In Dukandia you craft, and build structures, materials, and well crafts. You use the growing environment for your own needs chopping own trees, terraforming, and anything else you can do to get materials. Later I will populate this post with a list of alpha one objects, crafts, and structures that will be build-able and how. along with behind the scenes formulas for how they work.

Main Menu

The main menu; registering will be done on our website.

Pixel art:

Below are some examples of what we have done so far.

Tall Grass

plant stage 4

dirt

Great visuals for the login screen! Looking forward to some screen shots. You should keep a journal for this project.