Driftwurld: Even farmier...

I like some of the modifications I've made to the farming stage of Driftwurld.

What happens now is that every single person who has registered has a chance each day of generating goods on their farm, since they went and made the difference of registering. The bigger their farm, the higher the chance each day. Over time their farms can collect up to $30 worth of goods.

And new players can claim such goods if the other player has not visited their farm in the last ten days. Just new players though - once you aquire a crawler transport, this option isn't available anymore. You've moved on and other farmers lay claim to the goods.

This means new players can rapidly collect goods, but NOT because I just made the collecting faster, but because of the effects of other players (ie, their choice to register and to an extent how much they build their farm). This also means people who register but don't continue to play are, with their original choice in terms of registering, still part players in the lands of Driftwurld!

Also I've set a cap on how much you can harvest from your own farm per day. When you don't have a crawler, it's $2500 worth of goods. Once you own a crawler, it's a big drop down to $100 per day. This basically represents how prior to owning a crawler transport, you had spent most of your early preteen to teen life farming and so could have collected quite alot of goods. But once you get into the fast lane...crawling (?!), then you don't have that much time to spend on the farm.

I guess some people could just play the game by staying farmers and never advancing to owning their own crawler transporter. This way they could earn $2500 worth of goods each day, but what would they use it on? Aquiring hard wood logs? Once they own 200 or more of those, other players can buy from them. Which is a way of making game money directly, but not really the fastest. Though hey, maybe you only aspire to be a farmer, and it works out in a way?

In the end, I like how it's not just me, the designer, waving a wand and making things faster. It's a direct result of people signing up for the game. The code I put in wouldn't make any difference if people hadn't done that!

Driftwurld: Down on the Farm

Well, I added farming to Driftwurld, but one player expressed concerns you could just keep earning farm goods all day long. In a way I wanted it to be that way - I wanted it that on the first day the player could earn enough goods to trade for enough logs to (bear with me) trade for a crawler transporter.

I'm not sure how I want to do it? Put a cap on the first day that's high enough for the crawler trade, then a lower cap every following day?

The fact is, I'm not even sure alot of players will play it enough to earn enough to go to the next step. Perhaps I'm missing a social element - I'd banked on the ability to raid other farms as being that. Speaking of that, I set each raid on another farm as a skill roll - but I'm wondering now whether a failed roll at the start means another registered player who ceases playing? Certainly I heard that world of warcraft stats showed that if a player died when first trying the game/failed, they often ceased playing.

Anyway, might lower the requirement for a crawler transport. Though it seems players just like to latch onto the first part of the game they come across, rather than complete the first section they come across and migrate to a newer section. Certainly other browser games roughly work that way - the first section you come across, you'll be there in five hours time (with higher stats, but it'll still be the same).

On the other hand, perhaps I'm expecting too much uptake? It'd be interesting to look at the stats of urban dead and see how many players just don't continue after a few clicks. Certainly that's a game where you click about 30 times and miss the zombie pretty much most of them.

That's it, I'll put in the cliche of the moment - zombies! Have to kill some around your farm! And co-incidentally, they have cash on their rotting corpses! Hehe!

Driftwurld