Town Crier Episode 0 Part 2

Video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/227506924

Date: 2/10/2018

Topic: Player Housing

Participants: Stretch, Deverin, Hudy

Please note: All parenthetical notes represent transcriber commentary. Deverin: This episode is about player housing which should be released in the next few weeks, very cool stuff  and we’re grilling Hudy on everything about that. So as far as what we know about player housing, it’s essentially gonna be the introduction of a new skill, construction or building, have you decided on a final name for that?

Hudy: It’s gonna be Construction.

Deverin: Ah okay, as for that, we know it’s gonna take planks, nails, nails made through blacksmithing stuff like that and a lot of time, but we don’t really know more apart from that and a lot of the people who may have been paying attention or are too involved in their own tradeskills, probably wanna know a lot of the rest so they know how they fit in the picture. So what exactly to you is a player house in the world of Talibri and what does it let me do?

Hudy: Player house is kind of like your foothold, it’s gonna be tied to a city, right now we only have two cities, I wanna say 3 more coming out on the the release of player housing, and another thing we’re gonna see is that each city is gonna have its own crafting station for all the different crafting so you don’t have to go to only Gild to do your own cooking, it’s gonna exist in Lowenheim and there’s a couple other city names, Roar’s the names guy so I’ll have to consult with him but all of the cities are gonna have all the crafting opportunities and you get to pick where you live. Right now it’s not gonna have much of an impact but in the future, cities are gonna be expanded, there’s gonna be like city councils, and there’s gonna be stuff to build up inside the city for bonuses. For now, player housing is our first step towards communal play but on a more personal level and guilds are gonna be a part to that so it’s actual building of the community so, yeah, it’s our first big expansion I’d say. (Talibri: Player Housing Expansion Pack, only 3.99)

Deverin: Very cool.

Stretch: Yeah. So how does one go about on making a house, what sort of people are involved, what sort of materials, costs?

Hudy: As mentioned earlier it’s gonna be planks, nails are a new refined material, an extra step from bars. So right now a single bar will turn into 50 nails which is a pretty sizeable amount, we don’t want nails to be too time consuming. Just more of a thematic component to it. Those are gonna be the two main components going into it. There’s gonna be a quality factor to it, the initial level of your house, the shack, won’t have a quality requirement. You can use any kind of wood, any quality, any kind of nails, also of any quality. Certain additions may require certain kinds of wood, they might require some other materials, we might have some unique additions that won’t require any wood, so there might be some added stuff to it. But in most cases it would be just planks and nails. And higher level stuff will require higher quality. I’m not gonna answer everything right because I’m sure you have more questions. (Oh yes we do)

Stretch: *chuckling*

Deverin: *chuckling* Yes we do (Told ya).

Hudy: I tend to just ramble on until it’s all there in the open. I’ll have this be more of an interview.

*more chuckling*

Stretch: Is there a way for me to buy rather than build a new house?

Hudy: Yeah, so the way it’s gonna work is basically construction is gonna be done in a queue. Level 1 you’re only gonna have, I wanna say two openings in your queue and you’re gonna be able to slot up stuff so right off the bat you could set 2 shacks to be built and basically they each came packaged as an item and the item can be sold on the market under the building contracts tab, is what’s it gonna be called, and then when the person buys that they get to use that item so on your profile is where your house is gonna live, you’re gonna have a new tab which says player home, there, when you click on it it’s gonna show you your actual house, initially it’s gonna say “you don’t have a home”, you’re gonna have to buy a plot of land for, let’s just say 50,000 leol and then there’ll be a button that pops up that’ll say “place your player home” and if you have the shack item, it’s gonna say build. What’ll appear is at the top it’s gonna say what your house name is, you’re gonna have to rename it, a lot of people like that. How much space you have in it and what level it is. It’s gonna have a picture but I don’t have a picture right now so they might not have pictures starting out but eventually we’ll have them and then underneath that is gonna be the list of all the building additions that you can have. Anybody can make’em and sell’em if they want, initially Construction is only going to have buildings but Construction 2.0 is gonna come with furnitures, which goes into buildings. I’m sure people are gonna get bored with building the actual buildings themselves and additions because once everybody has them, the need’s not gonna be there as much, but hopefully by that time we’ll have furniture out and that’s gonna be consumed on a more regular basis.

Deverin: On top of that, how exactly do I make my house better, or rather how do I make it different from everybody else’s? Even if you can’t do that with the shack, it’s possible you can do that with some of the upgrades as well.

Hudy: Yes, So the additions is where your uniqueness will come into play, obviously everybody has their different focus. Each skill has three basic buildings associated to it, each has different bonus factors involved so that’s where the uniqueness comes in, and you’d just gonna have so much space that you can put in your player home, as you upgrade your player home you get more space, each building addition will take a certain amount of that space so you can’t build everything, as you upgrade your player home it will have more space and more opportunities to diversify your additions but if you upgrade your additions they will take up more space so you kinda end up with this juggling game of what do you wanna build, what do you wanna focus. There’s of course the opportunity to tear stuff down so you can tear down your kitchen if you no longer need it (because who needs cooked food anyway) and maybe replace it with a prospector’s room or something. Obviously that addition is gone, once you’ve finished destroying it but that’s kind of the caveat to it I suppose.

Deverin: How many of those furnishings will actually be available and does that actually cover most of the skill bases as far as what boosts you get?

Hudy: By furnishing you mean the building additions?

Deverin: Yes.

Hudy: Basically there’s gonna be three primary bonuses that’s gonna come out initially, that’s gonna be mastery, success and difficulty modifiers. The bonuses are activated by paying Leol, so you have to spend money to get it. And they basically are tick durations. The mastery one is going to be the most expensive one and the shortest and how’s it going to be working is you’re gonna be able to buy one free bonus time every single 24 hours. So I’d probably say every renew of the server time I’d reset the clock for everyone and they’ll be able to get a free bonus tick. After that it’s gonna cost you. And the cost will go up by probably 20% every time you purchase. So if you wanna buy a multiple of these bonuses, and they stack, feel free, they’d just gonna be expensive. So there’s the question of how much you’re willing to spend (will siphon the guild treasury) to get better and every 24 hours that amount resets. So once the free one comes back, you’re good to go. We don’t want players to just spam their bonuses and have them on for months and months, there’s gonna have to be some sort of tradeoff there.

Deverin: How far behind is the actual release of the base player housing 1.0 or the first layer of furnishings is gonna gonna come out and what kinda design do you have in mind for how you’re gonna expand that over time?

Hudy: Furnishings aren’t difficult, I just didn’t want to over extend with the player housing. I kinda tend to do that, I design something and I’ll just make it so wildly unique and, I don’t know, it’s just unbearable, I did that with the equipment  and equipment just turned into this giant fiasco, I mean it’s great it turned out fantastic but it took me a month and a half to do it so I’m trying to really pace myself. So furnishing release isn’t going to be that hard to do, the only caveat being it needs to be impactful, I don’t wanna add something to the game that doesn’t have a real impact so the point of furnishing is basically going to be that when you have furniture in an addition that has the boost on, there’s gonna be a chance or a guarantee that those furnishings will break. And they’re consumed in the process. However they give you benefits so furnishings gonna have qualities associated with them (ascendent toilet pls) while houses and additions don’t. They don’t have the rare, elder, any of that stuff. Furnishings will. Certain furnishings may increase the time or the tick duration, the higher quality you use, the higher duration you get. The other ones might add unique effects, it might increase the strength of the effects and eventually some furnishings will change how the bonus work. It just kinda adds more flavor to the player housing. And it adds more flavor to the construction skill. I didn’t wanna make the housing itself have a durability which will require you to repair it with these building items again because the point of the building is that they take a lot of time for construction people and they’re not gonna want to sit on that forever and furnishings are gonna kinda be the go to once everybody has their home, and those break. There’s gonna be masteries associated to those and all that fun stuff. They can play around more with that and that skill. Initially it’s gonna feel a little shallow, all people gonna want to have houses and certain additions are gonna be level locked so they have to get a certain level in order to build a certain addition. And I think that market is gonna be flourishing for at least the next couple of weeks. And hopefully by that time I’ll have guilds released, I’ve done some quality of life fixes and I can kinda address that in some kind of limited effect before I attack the combat rework (unexpected pun right there) which is gonna be huge.

Deverin: Definitely, so if you’re looking to get a house, unfortunately you wouldn’t have a rare or legendary house but you’d be able to have awesome furniture. That’s gonna be how you do it.

Hudy: So if you’re going for a mastery bonus you just smash the couch to smithereens. (meme idea)

Deverin: It’s how the party gets started.

Hudy: *chuckles* Exactly.

Stretch: In terms of the actual crafting skill itself, you mentioned before that it’s not going to have a mastery tied to it but levels are tied to it, right?

Hudy: Yeah but the actual construction of the houses doesn’t have any mastery involved to it.

Stretch: As you’re building these house are the resources consumed, are they per tick, initial upfront cost, and if that’s the case what happens if I run out.

Hudy: There isn’t initial upfront cost, for the leol cost, you’re basically renting a construction yard, thematically speaking just imagine it that way. As soon as you start that thing that’s in your queue, the money’s taken from you. You’d have to consider that the rental cost. And that’s non-refundable you’re not gonna get that back. It’s not gonna be huge, nothing gigantic, you know, just enough to kinda act as a sink. And then you’re first tick what happens is it’s going to calculate based on the resource cost and how much tick/time it’s going to take if there’s any kind of remainders so we wanted, theoretically, each tick to take an even amount out every single time. If something costs 400 planks and you do it in 101 ticks or something like that, we’re kinda gonna shave off that odd number on the first tick, so you’re gonna consume a little bit more at first then theoretically you’ll consume the same amount for the rest of your ticks. So from the example, first tick you’ll use 5 planks then use 4 for the rest of the ticks. So that’s kinda where we’re going with it. The planks and the nails are going to be consumed evenly every single tick.

Stretch: What you’re doing then is, with higher quality materials, you’re cutting down on the amount of materials being used, but that time still going to stay the same. Is that correct?

Hudy: Other way around, actually. So it’s gonna be material cost is always gonna be the same but the time you’re going to complete it is lower. Right now I’m still running the numbers so none of this is really final but right now every quality that goes from the minimum reduces the time requirement by 5%. So theoretically when you’re doing lower level stuff and you’re using ascendent level stuff you’d cut 45%, that’s gigantic. But you’re still gonna consume the same amount. So you’re not consuming less ascendent stuff, you consume just as much but you’re consuming way faster.

Stretch: What happens to consumed resources if I cancel out or I know I don’t have enough.

Hudy: If you don’t have enough that’s a little bit different. It’s not gonna let you start something unless it knows you have enough. However, if some weird thing happened like you posted your material up for sale or something, it’s gonna pause. It’ll keep track of the progress but it’s just gonna sit there, nothing’s gonna happen until it has enough materials for the tick to continue. That’ll stay in your queue forever so you can just go back to the construction yard or whatever we decide to call it. It’ll always gonna remain there so you can always continue it. Now if you wanna cancel that one out and start something new, the stuff you put in there is gone. You basically built the framing and there’s no point in tearing it down kind of thing so you just burn it. So yeah that stuff will be gone.

Stretch: Does armor or tools have an effect to this profession?

Hudy: No armor quite yet, but we’re gonna get a specialty tool at least alongside it. You’re a gonna get a nice mallet or something like that.

Deverin: You mentioned there are multiple different skills tied to Construction other than just building a house, what purposes are there gonna be other than building a house for Construction?

Hudy: This is kinda going into the future a fair amount so we’re talking about cities earlier, cities have buildings obviously, the way we’re gonna do alliances between guilds in the game is a little different. Like I mentioned before, cities are gonna have council seats, they’re gonna have a certain amount of council seats based from the city size. And the way it works is that council seats are filled by guild leaders so theoretically within a city there’s gonna be an alliance of guilds (is this log horizon). The council seats are gonna have their powers but one of their main goal is to guide their city on what they wanna build so there’s gonna be kind of a city treasury and they’re going to get to decide what buildings they produce, and all the construction folks are gonna be able to get together and work on this building and everyone who lives in that city is going to yield benefits once this building is done. So not only are player homes gonna make an impact on the development of your character but how your city grows and develops is going to impact you as well. And those construction folks are gonna have a huge impact on city in the future and really, anywhere construction comes in you know there’s the engineer class or affinity I should say. That’s gonna come out later on and the construction people are gonna build a lot of their constructs that they’ll use in battle so they’re gonna be pretty tied together, we’re all working on those, you know, gathering and crafting skills all paired with an affinity. So there’s a fun dependency there. Like the ranger has woodworking pretty close tied to it.

Deverin: It’s definitely good to let people know that if they’re interested in this profession, of construction, it’s not just player housing that they’re going to be tied up with, there’s gonna be a huge future to everything that’s the constructor’s doing probably with a little more importance to the community of the game compared to the individual market. I really like that aspect of the game.

Hudy: Especially considering the homes, when everybody has them, and kinda has their niche build or all the buildings they want or whatever. The need for constructions is gonna fall. And that’s where the furniture kinda comes into play. Until we get to the point where city building gets implemented, until the engineer affinity comes out. We don’t want any profession to feel boring, and not useful so if that should be the case before we release any of those things, we’ll find a way to deal with it.

Deverin: And one thing a lot of people are gonna fear is, this is a really big question for you, can you fail at building something.

Hudy: Yes and no, you can fail a tick, maybe you smash a finger or something, it’s just gonna increase the time so we’re gonna see the dice roll mechanic with the construction again, so that same concept’s gonna remain and that’s going to determine whether your success per tick so basically the time required to build something is lowered by the higher quality of stuff but the difficulty is a little bit as well. Not gonna be as drastic as gathering because there’s such a big time component involved, I don’t wanna have this ridiculous failure rate by using this rare material or something. The goal I have in mind is to get people off from this normal grind, everybody is just gathering and crafting the normal stuff because it’s the easiest grind for mastery, but that’s boring. Mastery is gonna be a huge part of this, we wanna promote the use of higher quality materials but right now there’s nothing in the game for that. I think this will be a good impetus for people to move out, man up, and gather the rarer stuff and fail a little bit. Take a hit to your mastery efficiency in order to build buildings that potentially increase your mastery gain later on. There’s a tradeoff there but hopefully it’s better for everyone on the long run. And we can see more market diversity and stuff like that.

Deverin: The important thing in there is just that the normal supplies aren’t just what you’ll require to actually be a successful builder. Considering the biggest, largest resource that you need as a constructor is time. The higher rarity material are probably gonna be the biggest thing to make you successful. It’ll mean you’d be able to serve more people. And in building a lot of stuff, this is actually getting into our user questions that we’ve collected, we have someone look really far into the future and asks “To what magnitude of planks and nails are we looking at for fully fleshed out player houses?”

Hudy: … a lot? I don’t wanna say it because everyone will just say “f*ck this, I quit, there is no way” (f*cking casuals the lot of ‘em) But I guess in order to answer that we kinda have to get across the scope of what we’re intending to include in the game, the alpha was all about the individual which is great, the fundamentals are done there. The beta is a lot more about communal play so we’ll have guilds, cities and stuff like that. Territory control, and a lot more political aspects to it. After that, we kinda have this empire concept so we want people to be able to build cities for themselves in the future you know create this kind of global conflict and we’re gonna have events tied on that kinda scope. So when I say the highest level player house I have in mind right now will require millions of planks, that feels bad because you look at your daily creation of planks and it’s a mere speck of that. Really, the goal for player housing, I’m not intending people to get the maximum level house, given a kind of skill set, you know, workers are gonna come out, and that’s going to smooth things up a lot. You’re gonna have your own production lines, send them off to make planks themselves and that’s gonna make things a hell of a lot easier but you’ll definitely reach points where you look at the next level requirements and say why would I do this to myself? (why not?) And the answer is “wait, you’re probably not supposed to do that yourself” I don’t want anything to be unachievable but I give myself enough leeway every release so I can buff things and give benefits, you know the whole point  of 9 months to actually hit mastery 20 is that we can do things like player housing where they give mastery bonuses, pickaxes have mastery bonuses, player housing is the last thing that’s gonna give mastery bonuses, so it could come down to a feels good 3-4 months which for a lot people probably doesn’t feel good but when you’re playing an idle that’s meant to be played over years, that’s fine, you know, you’ve become the best at a couple of things and given the time we release new stuff, so yeah, that does really what the goal is, so don’t be scared by the scale of the numbers you see, because it won’t feel that bad in 3, 4, 6 month’s time.

Deverin: Earlier you mentioned workers, is this gonna be a NPC that’s gonna assist that can actually hire for a beer that I believe you’re adding later to the game so essentially if you’re not a big fan of doing stuff that takes a long time to do, And you like instead getting something every single tick, Construction is actually the perfect thing to put them up to, will that feature be actually released later on? We’ll probably have an episode on that much later on as well. Or another interview like this.

Stretch: Are housing and guilds going to be somewhere in an actual place or are they gonna be more ethereal entities that supply benefits to one or more people that they are tied to.

Hudy: Player housing is going to be tied to a city, and again, once we go into city development later on down the line, it’s gonna play a very important factor. Guilds are as well, guilds are gonna be tied to a city, and that’s how you can be part of the city council, the guild has to be tied there, and kinda have to be voted into power. So initially when those features come out it’s not gonna feel as much, when you create your guild hall, it’s gonna say “where are you putting it?” and I kinda assume most people are gonna wing it, until there’s an actual reason not to wing it, I’m fine with people just picking whatever, more likely, it’s gonna be, you’re not gonna be forced to stay there, when you move cities there’s a 24 hour cooldown, so you can still pretty much use your house but it’s just gonna get stuck to that one place for 24 hours and it’s gonna transition over, obviously there’s gonna be safeguards so that any events that are going on tied specifically to that city, tied specifically to that guild or whatever, you can’t just leave and join and reap the rewards. Because one of the problems in games are people who guild hop or city hop at the end of an event and get all the rewards and leave again. We don’t want that kinda abuse. That’s more of my problem than anyone else’s but I’m just warning everyone that I’m thinking of it.

Stretch: So these are more of like mobile homes and RVs than actual houses.

Hudy: This is the best part of being in a fantasy world, I don’t always have to deal with explanations that always make sense.

Stretch: That’s Roarbee’s job.

Hudy: Roar sometimes hates when I do this because I love saying “because magic”, ‘cause you know, who’s gonna argue with me. But really that’s where it comes down to, there’s a lot of freedom of expression there, there’s fine line where game mechanics meet something that makes sense and sometimes it’s kinda hard to mesh those together and having the ability to just say “oh you know there’s a magical thing that helps you do this” is a really great cop out. I really like that but Roar really tries hard to find logical explanations to some of these things whereas I am much more likely to just say “f*ck, it’s game magic”. We balance each other out pretty well, he usually gives a better excuse than I do, and I’m just like “yeah you magically teleported your house” but we’ll probably come up with something cooler.

Deverin: About how many levels of housing will there be after the shack. I know you mentioned shack as level 0, are you just gonna release them over time as it becomes relevant to player level overall in the community?

Hudy: I actually have 18 levels of player home.

Deverin: And you’re saying the highest one costs a million?

Hudy: Not quite, there’s a lot but the most logical place I’d say most people would stop would probably be level 6 or 7. And 18, right now these numbers are likely to change but it’ll need like 100 million planks, it’s a lot, a shitload actually. But the goal is you’re never gonna hit that in this current state of the game (so if I make 27,000 planks per day, on a good day, It’ll take me 10 years, 1 month, 22 days and 22 hours. A good enjoyable decade!) An by the time we actually get there, players homes would likely evolve to a player city. Right now it’s a home but I can fully see this, I designed this in a way that make it easy for me to just kinda turn it into a player city. I already have the ability for people to have multiple buildings, right now I’m just forcing it to have 1. By the time we get to that situation, (Deverin asks Hudy if there will be ingame marriages) No, no marriages yet. (Hudy’s wife comes in, stream exclusive stuff) So player cities are kind of like the long term goal in the design so it’s not gonna completely break my back when the time when it’s actually time to implement it, but yeah, I figure 6 or 7 is gonna be an easy target, and once workers come out, I can easily see 10, 11, or 12 especially when people get really into it. And there’s probably gonna be another cap until there’s an easier way to get mass produced planks. So people won’t be able to do it, but they’re may not be any benefit to it yet. Housing is something we’re gonna add to as we go on. As more fundamental features come out, there’s a greater opportunity for us to make a building that makes that better so once the combat rework happens, there’s a lot of new mechanics that we’re gonna be introducing to combat and I fully expect 5 to 6 buildings to come out that’s gonna modify combat in some aspect.

Stretch: Are you planning to have special events tied to housing? For example, during easter will you be able to visit someone else’s house, view their profile, find an egg, find candy during halloween?

Hudy: That’s a cool one, so finding things in their house. I don’t know how to program that at the moment but super low on the priority list I might add, not a bad idea but not gonna see anytime soon. Gifting people is something I’ve been considering especially given the whole tumultuous premium currency that’s going to, you know, things that you could sell for leol. There’s a kind of controversy for a while. So gifting is something I’ve thought about. But you’ll be able to see another player’s home, the additions that they added into their home. You’re basically effectively visiting them, I may block that at some point in the future once we get to the more political aspect of the game where guilds kinda become a real thing and cities alliances happen and knowing what people’s homes are made of, and what kind of additions they have and everything kind of gives you hints in terms of what they’re doing and some people may not like that but right now you’ll be able to see it but in the future it won’t be the case. But the visibility right now won’t be that much impactful because I fully see people changing the way they do things as more stuff gets released. So yeah, you’re gonna be able to see the house.

Deverin: On the topic of actually seeing someone’s home, you actually answered 90% of this question earlier, “can you actually name the home?” and you said it was yes but a lot of people are asking this and are concerned that if someone else builds a house you buy it from them, will it say “built by?”

Hudy: Not right now, but yeah sure. It will, I didn’t think about that.

Deverin: An ongoing concern about that is because houses are built, upgraded at a time and of which becomes a new level of a house, that’d create an issue where it’d say “built by” and there’s seven different layers of “built by” tags, so is that a thing that’s going to happen where it’s like a giant Matryoshka doll where everything is kept in a different layer?

Hudy: Yeah, I’ll just keep adding the builders to it, I don’t see why not, like 18 people helped build this home and this addition is built by this person. Yeah, I don’t see why I shouldn’t do that.

Deverin: There might be people who want to hide that because I know a couple of people that I’ve talked to and want that pride of saying they built their house but if they actually have another job they’ll probably not want to spend the time to build it all themselves. Actually if they have a worker who builds the house, who gets to have the “built by” tag?

Hudy: That’s true so initially, workers aren’t gonna be able to make equipment and homes. So they’re gonna start out as gathering and refining slaves and that where they’re going to, they might be able to do components too. But eventually they’ll be able to do everything. Workers are gonna be built in phases, eventually they’re gonna basically be miniature players where they can do their own thing with their own mastery sets, initially they’re just going to have skills that have levels and they’re gonna do kinda flat chores at a certain speed and stuff like that. They’re gonna have stats of their own but that’s a concept that’s gonna be built upon by a lot. But their initial release is gonna be “let me help you make production lines, you do the hard stuff and we’ll do the grunt work”. And that’s the base we’re gonna build off eventually. You’re basically multi accounting, your gain is like if you are multi accounting and that’s what the goal is, you’re gonna be able to trade them off and what have you. There will be a market for that as well.

Stretch: Taxes, is there gonna be taxes in place for houses? Also are there going to be risks towards damaging the house and is insurance available?

Hudy: Taxes, initially no. Once cities are controlled by city alliances, taxes will become a thing. And they’re gonna be set by the alliance, or the council seats, I should say. There’s the opportunity to control the seats, if the taxes are too high, the player base can submit their votes and some sort of reduce their power for somebody else to takeover the council seat. So really, you don’t want to piss off your constituents, in this case all of the people living in your city. But right off the bat there’s not gonna be any consistent leol upkeep at the moment, I think you view the bonuses themselves as the taxation upkeep. You’re paying leol to actually activate them so right now I don’t see the need to say “weekly you own X amount” or something. That’s overkill.

Stretch: So is there a risk towards damaging player structures?

Hudy: Not right now.

Deverin: You said earlier that you’d have a durability for the furniture, even in that, is there no risk of damaging other people’s furniture like a house fire or something?

Hudy: No, if we can come up with a really cool system about that that’d be great, but right now for the sake of just breaking shit I’m not really a huge fan of. I can’t really see a meaning, when you start activating bonuses on furniture in the future, I’d say any furniture has the chance of breaking and thematically might not make a whole lot of sense but I think in the structure of the gameplay it does, it gives construction workers something to focus on. When there’s a low demand for housing, so it gives them something to do while they’re in the in between time so. I don’t really do anything without any some sort of mechanic in mind. So if in the future you can put your house in a rift or something crazy, sure you’d damage the damn house but opportunity for reward there is going to be big enough that you’ll probably wanna do it. For now I can’t see it.

Deverin: I’m trying to think of some fun mechanic where some guild dungeon suddenly pops up out of nowhere and it’s actually the richest player in the world’s house that you’re just wrecking furniture in. That’s what the guild dungeon could be, a mad wizard suddenly pops out with a whole bunch of animated furnitures. So we've talked about how when you’re constructing a house and you’re finished on it you can actually post it up on the market and sell it, you can also place a house and move it, can I actually set another house, place it on a land and rent that out?

Hudy: Right now, no. I like the idea of secondary homes and stuff like that, it’s something I have been toying with so almost like the benefits of what are you doing or how good the house is only apply to things in the city, wouldn’t be hard to add but right now the constructs just aren’t there and I don’t think If I want to enforce something like that quite yet, once more mechanics are directly tied to the city, there’s gonna be benefits like if your guild lives with a city and you activate certain bonuses, the bonuses will likely only apply to those shops and stations inside that city. Once the council seats takes their position, they can activate bonuses but only for the residents of that city. Once I see those factors come into play, I can see the benefit of having a secondary home. There’s gonna some sort of unlocking mechanism to everything but I could definitely see the benefit to that because eventually we’re going to have 12-20 upward cities, but it really kinda depends on the player base, we don’t wanna overdo it like have many cities while each city has only 10 occupants, Roar already has multiple cities created in his mind so it’s just a matter of plucking the names out of his head and placing that into the game. You have a primary home, on the topic of the city councils, only the guild leader can be a councilman, like a step up towards community and I fully expect players who are going solo will create a guild for themselves so they be eligible. There will be a lot of mechanics surrounding guilds and I don’t want solo players to miss out on that. But if they wanna be solo that’s totally fine. They should still make a guild, that’s gonna be a lot of impacts there so there’s no reason not to.

Stretch: Considering the cost of a player house, you covered this a little bit, how well off do you expect a player to consider getting a shack?

Hudy: 50,000 leol to buy the plot of land, they’re gonna be able to construct it at level 1 construction, really, they’ll be able to build it themselves fairly simply. If they want to put the time and effort into it, it’s not that hard to do. If you go straight to combat which is a little difficult to do at this point if nobody’s supporting you. It’ll take a while so it’d be better for them to just do it themselves, financially speaking. But with the current guild situation and all the friendly player help, I think most people will get their house very very quickly. I think it’ll be more of a matter of how many people are convinced to pull into construction, I know some of the guilds have people set aside for that, like Pyrion or someone else just sitting on mountains of planks waiting for the system to come out so they can start constructing. I think the demand will be higher than what the number of constructors can supply. So it’s gonna be interesting to see, the cost will be extremely high if people try to buy them out of guild, I think the people who are thinking this kinda thing is in a guild so obviously the guild member is going to be furnished fairly quicker than those who are not. So if you want you can go out there and build a shack and put them on the market, because I have a feeling there’s not gonna be that many in the market. And if there are, they’re probably expensive.

Deverin: Will there be housing leaderboards that rank who has the biggest shack? (big shaq is #1 ofc) and will there be a leol leaderboard to show someone’s net wealth or just the amount of money they have in their pocket, will it come out with housing or some time soon after?

Hudy: I’ve been adding lots of logging to the game recently, To prevent multi accounters, solve strange bugs that occur like this weird negative exp one that has been plaguing the players the last week, and a part of that is market logging. So I’ve added pretty extensive market logging in terms of certain items are sold to certain people stuff like that whereas before it’s much more vague. So I have the data being saved in order to observe these kinds of trends. But I think the problem is time, which is what it always comes down to, do I want to spend a week or two creating these market leaderboards that I’m sure will have efficiency problems, whenever you’re trying to pull up crapload of data, there’s always the back process and stuff like that that can give problems so I gotta make tweaks here and there to avoid having the page load forever. But what I am going to do is when player housing comes out, I want to get kind of a general economy graph on the main page so I already kind of have the construct build to show the current total leol in the market, just how much money everybody has. I’m just gonna throw that chart probably on the dashboard, so people can see now that we have a leol sink in the game, you’re gonna see some high things and probably dip pretty fast. Which is good, it’ll let everyone monitor the health of the economy over time. And it gives us a sign whether we need to add new and valuable stuff to the game. I think player housing is gonna be so big of a sink  I almost have to like nerf it, make it cheaper for player, but I’m starting off at pretty strong values. So we’ll see how much it tanks the economy and if it really gets bad, pull it up a little bit. I mean we’re also releasing the new combat zone this weekend and the interesting thing about this combat zone is that it’s not so much as hard in the sense that everything’s gonna murder you in a hit, but more like it’s gonna take you a decent amount of time in order to fight these creatures and afk-ing it would not be the optimal choice anymore. You might have to react to the skills they use, not exactly kill you but your damage is going to drop drastically, they might heal when you least expect it, your next attack instead of damaging them, it just heals them up, so you might wanna not damage on that turn, and I know there are scripts out there that handle combat but I think they’re gonna have to be more creative with these new creatures. For the housing leaderboards, I don’t see the need to do it right now. It is something I can do fairly easily, but the next time I adjust leaderboards I have to add component crafting to it because I think that’s more necessary than player housing. What I might do is maybe put some chat logs, like when someone upgrades their house it’ll show up there, I don’t know. I wanna do more of that anyways because love that shit. We’ll see how it goes, I’ll say why not but not anytime soon, there are probably more things to be done that is more important. Cities are gonna be the focus hopefully on the second half of this year. I wanna get combat in a really good place, I wanna get guilds in a really good place, they both kinda tie in with each each other with guild vs guild, I wanna do some territory control kinda situations. Once those systems are done at least in their basic form, we’ll move into city development, start designing those aspects, start talking about them a whole lot more, getting player feedback, I’m sure people have a lot of ideas. It’s the beginning of beta and we have a lot more we wanna do it’s just a matter of time.

Question and Answer


 * 1) Will you be able to equip workers with tools - not in version 1, but yes. Like I said, they are basically going to be players, almost anything a player can do, a worker can actually do. There might be some caveats like equipment crafting is a one off kind of thing, you’re not doing that in ticks. So I don’t foresee them doing something like that. But everything that’s done repetitively, they’re gonna be able to do it. There are gonna be some differences, you doing it is always more efficient than the worker doing it. We wanna make you the leader, you are the master and they are your servants basically. Not intended to be as good as you are. And they’re intended to just alleviate some of the burden on you. A lot of the stuff in the future is gonna require large quantities, right now everyone is just focusing on low quantity high quality which is great. Workers are there to alleviate that desire for higher quantity. So you can still focus on the quality and you just naturally get higher quantities of things. There will be a cap on the amount of workers, you wouldn’t be able to just hire a hundred of them, there will be a cap that is going to be raised by player housing level or something like that. You can have a self sustaining system you’re just working on half efficiency. That being said, the way beer is going to work is not probably what you’re thinking of. Basically your worker will have a desire/needs level, and entertainment level (send in the strippers) keeping those filled to the maximum are going to make your worker more efficient and better, you can not feed them beer, you can not feed them food. But they’re gonna suck, they’ll go slow and probably fall asleep on the job.
 * 2) Can we have roommates - one person one house, even if marriage is released they will still stay on different houses.