Indie-Resource.com

Let me pick your brains a bit. After being a Pen and Paper RPG'r for the past 20 years I have always had to have any campaign/game I build to be be a living world. A place that changes overtime and changes whether you are playing it or not.

I have been thinking about and designing a web game for quite sometime that plays whether you are logged in or not. You control a small "empire" that develops and grows or dies in real time. When I say this I mean more than the average upkeep game. Your heroes will go out and train, fight, die with or without you. Your generals will train their men, or even send them to the stockades on their own. Random events will happen throughout your empire. It will be a every evolving world. All of the empires will be a part of one big map that also has events. Creature raids, storms, ect..

Any ideas to add to this?

A rough example would be Animal Crossing.
It worked simply by:
-Check Current Time
-Then based on that time is asses what should have happened before, what is happening now, and what is coming up in events.

So it's very pre-planned kinda changing in the world.

You would have to make alot of Ai systems like:
World
Player
Empires
Weather
NPCs

Then have each person respond to different effects
Example:
A peasent does its daily basic AI routine
If it rains it does it inside
If time is spring is farming
City is at war it hides

Then each of these effects everything else, making a big AI web.
Thats how I see it, it seems like it can be built from the ground up.

If its multiplayer then good luck with the server to hold all that but you could easily make the world keeping spinning
If its single player then good luck making it continuly run unless people paid money to have a server that runs their game alone.

the server would be hit no more than normal really. The events would be done with crons and all of the calculations would be done on a separate server than the actual database server. Server 1 would run the cron and finalize the calculations down to a db query string then run it and hit the db server. All would be done on hosted servers I already have.

The preplanned changes is what I want to get away from. Everything would be randomized down to the amount of events and when they happen. The AI of course would be scripted but would be very randomized other than like what you say, tasks would depend on current situation.

Hmmm...thats a toughy...

*Begins thinking process...*

The game LOVE seems to be doing this very well.

Checkout the website for more info: http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

Have you ever checked out the pen and paper game 'universalis'? Gameplay is about making the world and it's parts/peoples, rather than gameplay being just about playing it's peoples/playing characters.

I think if the projects about a realistic or plausible world, if people have had a hand in crafting that world people are more likely to think it's realistic and/or plausible.

Edit: Put link in, since I was lazy before...

wow i will check that out, thanks!

In one of my previous project we wanted to do something similar to this. But rather than have each player own an empire, each player would be part of an empire. The political structure of the empire would be developed by the players, and there would be one player, or maybe a council of players, in control of the empire. The citizens of these empires could preform all the events to add or detract from the empire where they live (ie. fight for the empire, inspire a secession, overthrow the government, etc.). The project was later dropped, but I have always liked the idea.

Ever played The Guild?

Pretty good single player game where they tried to throw a lot of economics and political sides to the game but they were just too shallow. Game was fun but you could figure out the AI's motives and eventually know what each family or guild would do next. Having people as the real players running for office and seats would be great.