How do you imagine Multiplayer? (Desktop Tuesday)

Development
1

I think it would be nice to have a thread, where everyone can explain how they imagine the multiplayer of Stonehearth.

#How do I imagine the multiplayer?

I would like to talk about 2 different multiplayer mechanics:

Event-Sharing

Event-Sharing mechanic allows players to get random player generated events on their maps. This way, there will be many thousand events (small story lines, maybe even epic long story lines, specific monster raids, boss monsters etc.) for the players to be available, which ensures that the game offers many different experiences. The problem with this however is, that there will be many trolls which create nearly impossible events, or events that don’t fit into the game. In order to avoid this getting out of hand, players must have an option to rate an event. If this even receives to many negatives votes, it automatically gets removed from the event list and therefore wont appear anymore. Ofc that means that if a new shitty event has been released, it would appear on some players maps, kinda ruining the fun. That’s why I would create 3 different options for random events:

  1. You don’t get any user created events at all (only events createdby Radiant)
  2. You only get user created events that received at least 10 upvotes
  3. You only get user created events that are in the top 100 (or more, if there are enough positive rated events).
  4. You get all user created events

This way, players who really dont want bad events at all, would choose option 2 and 3. To make this work, there need to be players who go for option 4 and rate new events (like if they are game breaking and if they fit into the game or not). To motivate players to do this, I would like to see something like a small reward system, that rewards players that play option 4 (like new hairstyles, new clothes, accessories etc.). This reward system would also work for people who created events. If an event gets positive ratings, you also unlock the listed things, BUT negative rated events will punish you, so that it gets harder for you to get the rewards. This would prevent that many players upload crap events.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer means you play with at least one more person together on the same map. I would like to see multiple options:

VS-Mode: 2 (or more) people are on the same map and can attack each other.
COOP-Mode: 2 (or more) people are on the same map and play together, but each having their own town/city/ressources. Players can support each other if they want to, for example to succeed surviving big raids from monsters or they trade with each other.
True-COOP-Mode: 2 (or more) people are on the same map and play together, but they both share hearthlings/ressources. This way, people can communicate with each other and decide who does what (or they don’t and everything goes chaos).

Now the question is: How does game speed work in multiplayer? I would suggest that the normal speed is the standard and players can always switch to standard without asking other players. If someone wants to stop the time, everyone playing has to agree to that. This way, you can skip some time to progress faster. Or you remove it completely and players have to play in normal speed all the time.

Ok, that’s it from me. How do you imagine Multiplayer in Stonehearth?

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Yeah, I tried that with my thread, but of course, I don’t have the authority to make an “official” thread either, so you’re welcome to this one.

I like your idea with game speed. Here’s my question for you: what do you imagine to be the simplest form of multiplayer the devs could implement that would be a good starting point? I thought a 2-player co-op map (with adjusted enemy difficulty) would be the simplest. Nothing else changed, just two players in the same “zone” with a bit more of a challenge and a fixed game speed. From there, there are of course many changes one could make later on, but that to seems like the best “test” for multiplayer. I’m curious as to what your opinion of it is, though.

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I wouldn’t look so much forward if I would be you. Sure it’s good if you have many ideas for the future, but don’t make too big steps. Just start simple. Just start with a starting point like Bearwhale suggested: code the feature that you can go to a premade test-map and invite a friend. You dont have to be able to build or sth. like that. It just has to be able to load both players (maybe with inputchecks so you can be sure that you receive the inputs from the coop-player). And then think further

4

http://www.stonehearth.net/dt-roadmap-part-2/

“In the case of multiplayer in particular, we’d like to hear how you imagine yourself playing it, which will influence the prototypes and explorations we’re making.”

They want to hear these kind of ideas from us now so that they can plan ahead and what they need to realize for the prototype in order to have a fully functioning multiplayer at the end. Nothing is more annoying then coding a feature (Multiplayer) and then players start asking for features which can’t be implemented since the code does not fit for it.

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I understand that. We should definitely be submitting ideas for multiplayer so that Radiant can use them in the future. But I doubt that a 2-player, co-op setup would “break” the code for future ideas. It seems more like a stepping-stone to me than something that would stop other multiplayer features from being implemented.

Maybe I’m naive though, and I would welcome a dev’s perspective on the matter.