Messages

1

AVWW Brainstorming / Re: Brainstorming: Curtailing Infinite World Folder Size Growth

« on: December 05, 2011, 12:02:01 PM »

I agree with FallingStar that it does make sense that the Valley Without Wind that we're all striving for does really exist. Maybe if we combined that with bluddy's idea, and every so many continents the NPCs actually FOUND this valley.... But wait, the cataclysm has brought out MORE landmasses, and the citizen of those now need to be brought to this valley. Thereby making the Valley Without Wind sort of like a trophy room with all the NPCs we've saved.

Sounds very interesting. So it would be like a safe haven among all the chaos. Some continents would have "valleys without wind" and others (most others) would not...so the settlements/outposts in those regions would be volatile and unsafe so they would need to be evacuated to the rare but stable valleys. Perhaps eventually entire continents would fall apart (even resources/overlord/settlement tiles) and it would be your job to transfer what you want to save to these (would there be more than one?) valleys. It could be like the town building location management system now but on a larger world scale.

I second (third?) this.  You can keep the settlements that you care about by moving them while letting the game "garbage collect" most of the regions.  Maybe this could be linked to the Illari?  Certain (rare) settlements' Illari would have the ability to create a permanent "valley without wind" after you destroy the overlord, others would need to move to a more stable continent.

Here's another idea I just thought of. What do those jumbled up tiles from different time zones suggest to you? A variation on Tetris or Bejeweled, anyone? It sounds a little crazy, but what if you had a mission in one of several tiles. Solving the mission would return the tile to its proper timeline or something like that -- it would disappear. The remaining tiles would then move in to occupy the missing space -- space and time are collapsing in on themselves. If you manage to line up and clear several tiles in a row, you get special bonuses. One of your subgoals (which you don't have to care about too much) is to return every tile to its proper time. A macro puzzle game mechanic also ties in well with the concept of infinite worlds -- Bejeweled can go on forever.

I kind of like this idea, and it could even tie in with the "rare stable continent" idea.  I'm not sure how well it would tie in to the current backstory, but returning tiles to their proper timeline would be an interesting side job, even if it only increments a score counter or something like that (regions saved vs regions lost).  Rather than letting the unstable continents be destroyed, you could work to "return" as much of it as possible before that happens.  It would return whole region groups as you completed missions (ie. a 3x3 ice age group rather than each individual ice age region).  I suppose  this might get tedious after a while though.