Altered Alterations

One of the biggest complaints from the 4 alpha testers playing Faith right now is that there isn’t enough ways for them to interact. While I first argued that there was, it is actually a fair bit behind Asylum. At this point in development Asylum didn’t have much interaction either - parties, attacks, and scandals were all added during Beta. While there aren’t many players to interact with at this phase, I think I’ll go ahead and add some player interaction features, so they can become a bit more integral part of the game than they were in Asylum.

Of course there remains the problem of cheating. The more players can interact, the more weird and wonderful ways they’ll try to create multiple accounts and screw each other over. Luckily I have some good ideas of how to combat that.

An important milestone was reached today - I moved my todo list from my computer into the Bug System. My 50 most-wanted features and bugfixes for Faith are now laid out, and the testers can now start logging bugs. Some of the top-priority items include Holy Wars, Artifact Auctions, and to start a help system (which will be more extensive and more integrated into the game than Asylum’s.)

Anyway, I’m off for my summer vacation (three nights camping) and will be back on Thursday.

Places of Worship is now reassembled, and working all right. It’s going to need some polish and rethinking over time, but it’s a pretty decent system I think. I’d still like to provide more customization options for your places of worship (currently you have name, size, location, focus, awesomeness, and age.)

I recently made it so games can end, and one of the games that was running is approaching endgame. It’s neck and neck between myself (with 12000 followers) and Elephant Man (with 80000). I think I might lose.

I think I’ll soon be working on the Holy Wars system - I wanted to attack him with my gold stockpile, but the current system is very meager. I don’t want a whole war strategy system (Faith isn’t about war really) but I would like to get some sensible calculations in there for damage and such, maybe give you a couple different types of wars.

I’ve been pretty sick the last few days, which has conspired against me. Just as I was getting sick, I pulled apart the Places of Worship page, and realized the whole thing needs to be more complex than I’d thought.

It turns out that the idea of figuring out how many followers will visit a place of worship in a given time period isn’t simple! I have to take into account the place’s location, capacity, awesomeness, number of followers, community level of followers, and age of the place.

This isn’t very hard, except for one extra variable - how do other places of worship affect each others’ attendance? When I realized my calculations didn’t take that into account, I realized programming whilst sick really is a bad idea. Anyway, I’m working on a simpler design for the system that’ll take all that into account, and be understandable to players! Hopefully it’ll be reassembled by the end of the week.

Of the two new testers added to the game, one thinks it’s fun and the other thinks it’s quite rough. In reality, both are right. It’s fun for the first couple days because you can feel the potential, but there’s still quite a few things missing that Asylum had. Examples:

- Humour
- Bidding on something
- Interaction with players
- Teaming up
- Intuitive interfaces

While those things are planned, they’re a bit lower on the list than some of the core game mechanics I’m still completing. For example I added a new feature last week called Social Programs that allows you to do things like keep your people healthy and such.

Also, the game can now actually end! This happens at a certain (predefined) level of scientific progress. You’ll be able to influence how long a game lasts by encouraging or discouraging science among your people.

Somebody asked about a paragraph-style description of your Faith. This is aready in the game, though somewhat simple. Mine right now says: “Faithism II is a movement with 10,375 followers that is difficult to follow. Corruption is a small problem, and followers are growing slowly. Other religions are neutral towards them, and their most recent technological advance is Firearms.”

Our move went well, and we should have proper internet tomorrow. My first task, I think, will be implementing my redesign of the Places of Worship page. Should be good.