Graywalkers: Purgatory - Update #3 & 4

Graywalkers: Purgatory has a few new updates in the last two days. I actually like what I'm hearing about the game, and I recommend everyone at least take a look at it.

The game itself has earned $14,460 of it's $100,000 goal with 29 days left. So without wasting anymore time here are the updates.

Update #3 - "Short and Sweet"

Hello everyone. Hope you all had a great weekend. Things have slowed down around here over the weekend but I’m confident that things will get better this week. We have 30 days more and are at 14%+ Not bad but I’m sure we can do better together. Our update today will be a bit short and with only a few points to share. Not to worry, we’re just taking the time to prepare better updates for the next few days as we delve deeper into the mechanics of the game itself.

Update #4 - "Emergent" Gameplay

"Emergent" Gameplay

Ferdinand Joseph Fernandez - Lead Engineer (@AnomalusUndrdog)  

So why are we tacking on another one of those buzzwords in our pitch? Actually this idea came separately from the Graywalkers game.

Before, I was thinking of making an action RPG where depletion of food sources actually matter. To pull that off, you'd need a working model of supply lines, just like what you'd see in a real-time strategy (RTS) game.

And from there, you'd need everything else an RTS uses: harvester units, resource-providing structures, resource storage structures, etc.

Imagine such things in an RPG.

Well, sure, you do see farms and farmers in your typical role-playing game. But they're just for show, right? They don't really do "work" work.

So I thought, why not make them really work, like an RTS would? But still play the game as an RPG?

In effect, you'd be playing the game as an RPG character, where other AI (that is, some NPCs) are effectively the "RTS players" in that world. Those "RTS players" would probably be a king, or a town governor, perhaps.

So, in essence, you'd get to play an RPG where:

1. When sieging a fortress, you could just let the defenders starve instead of making a costly attack.

2. You can destroy a faction's supply lines to disrupt their economy, thus weakening their city for an invasion.

3. When factions wage war with each other, you'd see territorial lines shift back and forth as they struggle.

I pitched this idea to Russell and he was pretty excited about it. So far, we have a working plan on how to merge it properly to the current design for Graywalkers. We've also been drawing inspiration on how other games do it, notably Mount and Blade.

I also did a bit of research on making a believable economy in fantasy settings, and two books I found helpful were Farm, Forge and Steam - A Nuts and Bolts Guide to Civilisations, and Grain Into Gold - A Fantasy World Economy, at least for a start.  

So, it's not like this is innovative; certainly it's been done before by other developers (and with quite an amount of success I might say). But we do think it's rarely done, and kind of a missed opportunity that most game developers aren't catching on.