The Kingdom of Philtopia

It seems I only work on this thing in the summer doesn’t it? Anyways, the last DDAY overhaul brought forth the longest continuous run of Doomsday ever, from August until New years the game was always populated.

I’d like to see if we can break that record so I am going to try and address a long running issue that has always plagued the game. In the first several days you play, unless you are very aggressive there is generally nothing to do other than research and explore. The fun doesn’t start until a few days in and many aren’t patient enough for that. This needs to be addressed.

Lets get to the game plan

Planned changes for next version of Doomsday:

• Daily quests:  These quests would be automatically generated once a day and would require the player to navigate a sort of dungeon with traps to somehow find the ending. The ending would contain a reward of some kind, either basic cash, scientists, units or land and also rare research items not possible to acquire through the research tree
• Random map generator: To generate the maps for the quests, the randomness means there would never be a repeat in game play
• north, south, east, west, fight commands, lets party like it’s the 80’s!
• PvP inside the dungeon, you may encounter other players (the fight command will be used here) kill them to knock them out of the quest! (limited to 1 quest attempt per hk)
• Attack and defense levels inside the dungeon based on research levels of your nation

We’ll see if this has any impact on player retention, it will add another interesting layer to the game. I already wrote the map generator this weekend, an ascii rendered output can be viewed here: http://philtopia.com/~spencep/showmap.php

# is path, S start, E End, * trap, . nothing