Wander is a collaborative, non-combat, non-competitive game focused on exploration and joy. Life begins as a tree. Storms that affect the known planets transform you, and continue to influence your path. A rare flower has many powers that can alter your course. As you explore, you begin to discover others in the the sprawling rainforest. Working together, you unlock new experiences, piece together the plot and enjoy the varied beauty that Wander has to offer. Wander features a gorgeous landscape, large scale non-competitive play and immersive sound design to create a world like no other.

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Shelter Improvements and Dream Crafting (Games : Wander : Forum : Wander discussion : Shelter Improvements and Dream Crafting) Locked
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Oct 14 2013 Anchor

We've been contemplating adding improvable shelters to Wander, to allow areas to become more personalised / home like for groups as they continue playing. i.e. you find resources around the world and can then select improvements at a shelter of your choice. The shelters would be basically collaborative building projects, where you get to customise the building and furniture. We're also contemplating a dream mechanic, where you can dream and go to a separate place, which is your personal customised part of the world and you can invite other people there. Dreaming would occur if you wanted to rest during a storm. As you find more things in the world you could imagine more things in your dream world.

What do you think? Is this a good direction to push with Wander? What else would you like? Crystal and Antony are currently working on the new cultures (lots of new cultures) that players will be able to find and morph into. These are variants of the existing forms, each with myths and stories around them. For example, the current Griffon is a combination of a golden eagle and a lion. We're currently working on cultures like the blue and gold macaw + black jaguar and sea elves. We're focusing a lot of effort on developing and deepening the narrative. The rest of the team are creating new content and making this work better and run smoother.

Oct 14 2013 Anchor

Improvable shelters.....could just anybody go into them or would they belong to a player? Kind of sounds like places any one could go, but how would you control who would be able to personalize it? Seems like hard feelings could happen if you make a shelter the way you want it and someone comes along and does something you hate to it.

Not too crazy about the term "dream". I'm playing another game that uses that term and the dream area is boring as hell. However, having a home that would belong to a player is very interesting. How to get there would be something you'd have to work out. If it's too easy to go to your "home" during a storm, wouldn't that take out the challenge of learning where the shelters are and getting yourself to them in time?

Since "gathering" things would be hard for most characters but the ent & elf (bipedal). We would need a way to collect and store the items we want to use for building or updating our "home". I'm playing another game where you gather things, but organizing them and locating them when you want them is a real pain. You might want to have a discussion with people who played Glitch to see a good way of doing it.....if gathering large amounts of things is in the works. I won't go into further detail at this point, but let me know if you are interested in knowing more.

I think Wander needs something like this. Right now, once you've found most of everything that is available (and I know more is coming), the game gets a bit slow. You can only visit the ruins and glyphs so many times and having to constantly change the world to make it interesting must be a pain for you all. Again, another reference to Glitch -- they had areas on the map that were unavailable to be visited and ever so often, they would open up a new land. Toward the end, when the game was closing, they opened up all the lands and it was fantastic running around and seeing everything. So, as game masters, how to do you keep the game fresh for people who want to play on a regular basis? Will there be some way for players to communicate with each other beyond chat? Like a bulletin board or a mail system? I know a lot of players on Glitch liked to throw parties....while I found them kind of boring, lots of them really liked being able to invite people to meet at a certain place and time to visit with each other.

Hopefully, some of the other people who have been playing will chime in on this topic. I don't have a lot of gaming experience and I'm sure they would have loads of better ideas than mine.

SkadiWu
SkadiWu Aaron Jones
Oct 15 2013 Anchor

You would have to be inside a sheltered area to dream. Because I'd imagine it would be hard to sleep outside in a storm.

Dream isn't a bad term the only one that comes close to what the idea wants is to spirit walk. Both of which are trying to find that inner peace. You can go there to escape the world. Which I know that there is some who are afraid of the storm.

As for the world its getting there. There's only a small group of people working on it so everything just takes time to put in there. You have the world memorized so when I put something new in you find it lol But all the islands will have things on it don't worry.

Isn't this a bulletin board? Or did glitch have something in it that could pop up on the screen while you were playing? Like a mini message board system?

--

Level Designer for Wander

Oct 15 2013 Anchor

Glitch was a MMO where the avatars wandered around the world and collected items that could be used to make other things. A spice tree supplied all kinds of spices for cooking, a berry tree gave all kinds of fruits, different kinds of rocks could be mined and later worked to make building extensions. Crops could be grown and stored for cooking as well as animal husbandry for meat and milk (which could then be made into butter and cheeses), so you can see a good storage system would be necessary.

Initially, you would be given a bag that had something like 10 spots in it. As you earned Glitch money, you could buy more bags. As other Glitchen learned to make cabinets, you could buy them from them or you could learn to make cabinets yourself. Or you could buy the things you wanted over on the "for sale" page. Eventually, there were even cabinets that would hold a huge, huge amounts of stuff -- like I'd end up with lots of milk, cheese, butter, veggies, fruit etc and I could put all of one item in this special box.

So, you could buy extra bags and there was a bar across the bottom of the screen of your inventory. You could buy more bags and put them in the inventory, so now you'd have one bag in one place, but that bag would hold 10 items. You see?

A picture is worth a thousand words. The Glitch site is still up. Here is a snapshop of snygyst's place: Glitchthegame.com (David Fisher = Snygyst -- he was playing Wander for awhile)

There are 3 blue cubes on the wall behind him showing meat, beans and milk. He could have hundreds of milks in that cube. I loved the cubes!
On the floor there is one of the bags next to the table. That bag could probably hold 15 items (it was one of the larger bags - there were two sizes). You bought bags from cartoony vendors you'd find throughout the game.

Glitchthegame.com
Here's a picture of a player who'd started making a room or building for himself (hence the unfinished walls) and he has stuff he's collected or made all over the place. No storage things in this picture.

Glitchthegame.com
Here's a picture of someone's house which shows some crops they are growing and some of the chickens she owned. Anyone could get into your front yard, but you had to be invited by the player to enter their house or backyard. So, if you grew crops in the front yard, anyone could pick them, but crops you grew in the back were protected. You could make different camera effects when you took pictures. Looks like she took this one in sepia. The houses were in color.

Glitchthegame.com
Here's a picture of my kitchen. Note the cubes on the wall are different from snygysts. You could buy different styles. The big cabinets held probably 30 items each. I made the rugs by combing foxes and making string and yarn. In the upstairs picture, you can see Mr PickleTickle on the rug. This game had such a wonderful sense of humor.
Here's a picture of the complete house: Glitchthegame.com
We also made towers where people could do various things. Some people made them into department stores; selling stuff to other players. Some people made them into journeys through poetry or just made them for fun. You could put stuff out for people to take for free too.
All my snaps: Glitchthegame.com
Oh man, I loved that game.

I know there are people who took screen shots and movies of the full screen that showed all the stuff around the edges including the working list of inventory that went across the bottom of the screen. If you are interested, I might be able to run down one of those videos. I'm still in some Google+ groups for Glitch.

I know cute is not what Wander is going for, but the system of collecting and storing things on Glitch was very effective. Other games I've played since then have been cumbersome to use.

I used to wake up almost every morning thinking about my Glitch house and what I was planning on doing. As usual, James and I had a system going where I made food for him and he did the housebuilding. :-) Kind of like real life. I'd hear the Glitch music in my dreams. I downloaded a lot of the music and all my snaps.

Sorry for going on for so long, but I just loved that game and even though it's almost a year since it closed, I still miss it a lot. Hope this helps you all out with ideas for collecting and storage.

****After I posted this, I see the links just show as glitchthegame.com, but when I clicked on one, it did take me to the snapshot I'd indicated above. Oh well.

****I found a screen shot that Angelo took (another Wander player) that showed the bottom of the screen where his running inventory was located. I put it over on the Google+ site so you could see what it took me forever to try to explain above. He shared it privately, so I couldn't get a bigger picture of it. If you need one, we could ask he post one on the Google+ site so you can see it better. Hope this helps.

***LATER -- Oct 27th ***
Don't know if you'll notice enough to read this since it just adds to the bottom rather than making a new entry.....

I was re-reading your question about a bulletin board and took it a bit differently.

What we have here is a forum. This is where we mostly talk to you, ask questions or try to answer other player's questions.

What I was talking about when I asked about being able to communicate in game, is we could leave "notes" for each other once we had the ability to make/store paper. So, if you saw something at someone's house you really liked, you could leave them a note. Notes were also used as sign boards where you could make a story (kind of like the old Burma Shave ads -- look it up if you're not familiar with this old advertisement style). People used them to make poetry places or to ask questions of other people. One person had it set up so people could tell secrets. Kind of weird, but creative.

You could also send mail to other players in game as well as items. If I wanted to give James a batch of cookies I'd made, I could mail them to him or take it over to his house and leave it on the ground, in his house (I had permanent permission to enter) or with his butler (they were funny little gate keepers to your house that you could leave messages or items with).

Glitch also had a sign post system where you could put 4-5 of your favorite players on it and then you could just go to the sign, select where you wanted to go and be taken to that's person's house. So, I had James as one of mine. It made it easy to visit with the people you like to play with. A lot of people put the head dev on their sign post as his house was always an interesting place to go ;-)

One other thing they did with the sign posts was, say you wanted to specialize in growing a certain kind of crop used to make potions. You would get on the "cornflower" (or similar) road and your sign would have someone else who is also growing cornflowers so if someone needed a bunch to make a certain portion, they could go harvest what they needed. It was always a good thing to replant and tend the garden of the person providing the plant as a thank you.

I don't know if this is more what you were asking, but I hope it helps.

Oct 28 2013 Anchor

@lokidavison "As you find more things in the world you could imagine more things in your dream world. "
this sounds like a good direction to me
since it would make the focus in the real world on exploring, discovering new things, and the crafting creation in the dream world, so there would be no need for bags and even gathering in the common sense, since you wouldn't need to drag materials to the dream world to craft them, you would need only to discover them and then find a way to use them
if so there are one more thing get discovered in the world aside from materials, which would be recipes, unless the crafting is designed to have recipes discovered by attempt
but if so, exploring+crafting, there should be LOTS of things to discover everywhere, or there should be a way to make the exploring last longer, maybe making the materials gets consumed everytime they're used in the dream world, so making it needed to look for them more times, otherwise the exploring part could run out sooner or later

@Glitchenhaze "How to get there would be something you'd have to work out. If it's too easy to go to your "home" during a storm, wouldn't that take out the challenge of learning where the shelters are and getting yourself to them in time? "
it would be nice if it's only the "soul" to go to the dream world, not the body, the body would still be in the real world and be affected by the storm
it would also make sense, since whyever should a body enter a Dream world? your body is already busy sleeping

@SkadiWu "You would have to be inside a sheltered area to dream. Because I'd imagine it would be hard to sleep outside in a storm. "
that looks like a limitation, make it hard to sleep outside, not impossible
or add some negative effect on who stays outside during a storm, like getting wet or something like that

"Isn't this a bulletin board? "
into the game
any shelter could have a board with papers or signs left there by the visitors, suggestions, messages, anything, it would help building the feel of the world being alive (cause of now, it feels like playing a singleplayer game)

i think narrative and background is nice, but a game needs to allow the players to write its history (following the narrative if needed) otherwise it's not a game, but a book or a nice picture, and once you've finished to read the book you're done with it

edit.
glitch had a big part of it designed to be a social network, to encourage communication between players, and then it had some typical game mechanics like the crafting, but a big part of it was about the social network side of it and how to make the best use of it to make the game enjoyable for all
wander doesn't seems to have been designed from the start with a social network mindset, which is what may feel to be missing for any old glitch player, but this dream world thing may be a step in that direction, just be sure to allow the most possible mobility and connectibility in it

Edited by: Zeando

Oct 28 2013 Anchor

I agree about the storm vs home thing, Zeando. What's the point of having to get out of the storm if it's too easy? That said, it shouldn't be impossible. Right now there are many, many places to shelter on Dryad Island and other islands have very limited shelter. That's a design issue.

If your body doesn't got to the dream world, I would hope it just wouldn't be standing around, AFK-like, in the real world. :-) That would be pretty odd.

Social network vs game -- right now Wander is not really a game and certainly not a social network. I haven't seen a soul in game, besides my husband, for months. Right now, I can't even see him. It was fun earlier on, when there were more people playing, but even then it was rare to run into people. Also, it's been mentioned numerous times, that it's nearly impossible to know when someone else is playing. The chat function is poor. If you're not constantly sending out pings (hello, I'm here), someone coming into game won't know you are there. It's also limited to the island, which would make sense in a crowded world, but right now makes you even more isolated. There really is no way to communicate in game as it is right now.

Most people I play other games with really like having goals and tasks. Some games overwhelm with tasks, but others have enough to keep your mind busy trying to accomplish something while still enjoying the exploring and finding things. The lore stones are a start. I want to know how the Ents sing. I want to know how the Elves make spice. Why can't that one griffin fly to the floating island? Doesn't she know how to glide? Can we do something with the starfish or the mushrooms? When is the spice coming back? And the storms?

The game is the most beautiful game I've ever played. Glitch was whimsical, cute and pretty in a different way. It was more cartoony. I don't want to lose this pretty world. Looking forward to continued improvements and new ideas.

Oct 29 2013 Anchor

Thanks for all the feedback here. We're working hard to build and code this as quickly as we can. It's been very useful chatting to players and seeing what works and what doesn't and improving it. A lot of the work at the moment has been from design, concepting and writing. Luckily a lot of that is picking up speed. We're going to try a few different variants of the dream crafting and see what feels best.

We've been a bit distracted over the last month or two with physical stuff as well. We've been showing Wander at a lot of events in Australia (and in Seattle!) which has been fantastic for getting realtime feedback. A lot of that is being included into the game now.

We might have to organise an event sometime soon after the dream crafting is in so we can test how well the dream sharing code works and see what everyone has found and created.

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