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[Oracizan]

Castles
Fun with Treason

Play Latest Version: [Mutant Dream] | [Facebook]
Read DevBlog: [Link]

(Click on images to enlarge)

Summary

Castles is a social game of strategy, diplomacy, and politics, in which you battle your friends for supreme control over a fantasy realm.

You begin the game as the lowest of low lords, a single castle to your name. By managing your castle and village effectively you can earn enough gold to build another castle, or you can arrange marriages, plot assassinations, and wage wars in order to take castles from other lords. Because you can only hold a small number of castles personally, you will eventually have to force other lords to bow to you and control their castles indirectly.

The lord who controls the most castles holds the Golden Crown and the highest title in the realm. How long they can hold onto that title is the true test...


Current Version Details

The current version will allow you to create characters and place their castle, and then you will be taken to the main screen and be able to view your randomly generated spouse, five knights, and wise advisor. By talking with these individuals, you can assign positions on your council, dismiss your advisor, or tell your spouse that they're comely.

You can also see the effects of time upon your castle. 5 real hours = 1 in game year, and characters will grow older accordingly. You will also notice your gold and population increasing. Both increase according to a strict formula, but you won't be able to examine the inner workings of those until I deepen the conversations with your council members.

One other thing that you will notice is that the treasurer will (very slowly) become better at their job. Like 1 skill point every 15 hours slow.

My goal is to have people constantly play throughout development, and to that end I'll try to deploy new versions of the game every time I reach a stable point with enough new features. I'll keep this topic as up to date as possible, but the main source of news for Castles is the DevBlog.

Edited by Oracizan, 10 August 2012 - 07:11 AM.

[Oracizan]

Small update this time around. Character stats are now displayed at the bottom of the screen. Stats include Name, Age, Honor, Piety, Deity, Opinion of You (Opinion is not yet up). The small bar at the bottom shows, in order Brains, Brawn, Beauty, Charm, Cunning, Fighting, Finance, Husbandry, and Servitude.

- If you look closely at all of the generated people you might notice a correlation between Brain, Brawn, Beauty, and the other 6 stats. Beauty influences Charm, Brains influences Cunning and Finance, and Brawn influences Fighting and Husbandry. Servitude isn't influence by anything. This will make DNA and careful breeding important as you raise your heir. Training with more experienced people will also come into play - hopefully it will all combine in an interesting way!

- When you first start your kingdom, your spouse and your staff all share your deity to make things easy on you. Opinion of you will also be maxed out (or near maxed out).

- Characters age in real time, even if you are not playing. 5 real hours = 1 in-game year. Eventually old characters will die and other characters will have to step in to rule.

- All characters think that they're Prince of Camelot...ignore them.

Final Note: If you do decide to try it out, the database may be cleared periodically whenever new functions are added that make old data incompatible. So do try it, but don't get too attached to your kingdom.

Edited by Oracizan, 12 July 2012 - 04:21 AM.

[Oracizan]

You now have the ability to hold discussions with individuals who reside in your castle. Eventually this will be how nearly all actions take place within the kingdom, but for now you can:

- Garner advice from your advisor.
- Assign knights a position on your council.
- Dismiss individuals from your council.
- Tell your spouse that they're comely.

Your Treasurer, Master-at-Arms, and Watch Commander have nothing useful to say right now, but eventually they'll help you with essential functions of your kingdom. I go into more detail in my latest DevBlog Post.

(Everyone still thinks that they're the Prince of Camelot, and of course that's not any more true than it was last update. )

[Oracizan]

It's been a while since I last updated, and with good reason: This update is a big one, at least in terms of development effort if not playability.

First, there are now 2 platforms to play Castles on: Facebook or Mutant Dream. This took up the bulk of my time, due to creating a user system from scratch for Mutant Dream and setting up the user verification. Hopefully this will help broaden Castles' horizons!

Second, the influence of time as a factor on your castle has been increased. Every hour your population grows by a certain percentage and you gain some tax revenue - I'll soon add conversations with your council members that allow you to control taxes & wages and look at why your population is growing at the rate it is. There are very precise formulas based on Watch presence, taxation, etc. I just have to let you see them.

You may also notice that the treasurer slowly gets better at his/her job over time. 15 hours = 1 stat point.

Very soon I'll post in the DevBlog about determinism and how I avoided writing the database every single hour to update the castles. I feel pretty clever thinking of it on my own but I'm sure it's been done before.

Edited by Oracizan, 25 July 2012 - 08:22 PM.

[DJ Vinyl Scratch]

I signed up just to play this game, and while I'm logged in I can't play. Fix this bug, please.

[Oracizan]

Sorry! You caught me at a (very) bad time; I'm currently upgrading the authentication system on Mutant Dream, which is why you can't play the game properly. I'm going though and integrating all of my games with the new system, which will take a while.

I don't know what your feelings for Facebook are, but that version of it is still live and running. The game (if you can call it that yet) is still pretty basic, but you can take a look at the graphics and shift around your knights if you'd like.

UPDATE: I gave Castles a quick patch that makes it ignore the new authentication for the moment, so it's live again on Mutant Dream.

Edited by Oracizan, 10 August 2012 - 05:48 AM.

[dmal]

I setup my castle and staff. and now what?
I cannot make the game progress.
I'm sitting there looking at my people, and nothing is happening!
sorry bro, but you need some better buttons.

[Oracizan]

The game is bare-bones at the moment, perhaps I wasn't clear enough in the first post.

(This could sound snotty if read wrong. I am legitimately saying that I may not have been clear enough.)

The current version is just showing off the character creation system and the dialogue system. I am still working on this - sporadically, I'll admit - and my focus is on the database structure right now. I realized that I basically need to have the backend planned from top to bottom before going any further, so the next update won't be for a while. That update should include a lot more of the "MMO strategy" components, however, and be closer to that traditional definition of what we call an actual "game"

Thanks for the feedback - care to elaborate on how the buttons could be made better?

Edited by Oracizan, 20 October 2012 - 09:35 PM.