Olvand

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Olvand is a little multiplayer sandbox RPG, where the players live in self-built towns and can go on all kinds of adventures together. Imagine living with your friends in a small town in the mountains, or creating a new group of friends in a pub in the metropole you all live in. There will be several mini-games the inhabitants of a server can play together, among which will be combat based games like King of the Hill or Capture the Flag. You will be able to play against other people in your city, or as a city against another city, or as a whole server against another server. The combat works with self-built guns, in which all kinds of powers can be combined to create unique effects.

Post news Report RSS Finishing the next update

In this blogpost, I describe my progress on the next update, which adds towns to the game.

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Hi all! Sadly, I don't have anything fancy to show you this week - i kind of shot my bolt the last two weeks - but I do have a lot of progress :). I worked on things like [statues], not being able to build things on land you don't own, being able to disband towns, having the territory of your town expand automatically when you build things at the edges, integrating the new [highscore] with the website, and much more. This is me testing the new statues:


Like I described [here], towns were really hard to implement as an ingame entity; you have to keep track of more things than a human brain can handle. Four such situations which really gave me a headache last week:

  • If you're in the middle of a town you don't live in, you will not be able to build your house ANYWHERE, which means you should be able to cancel building something and get back everything you already invested.
  • If the mayor of your town changes the town name, your GUI should be updated.
  • If the mayor of your town disbands the town, your GUI should be updated.
  • If you're the mayor of a town and you decide to disband it, all inhabitants should be 'townless' again (also the ones that are not online), and all territory should be 'forest' again.

I realize it sounds simple when I write it down, but if you've got to figure out how the game should work in hundreds of situations like these, it gets confusing. But it's done now! The only things I've got left to do are going through the list of bugs I want to fix this update, and test test test everything. I expect the new update to be ready for upload this weekend or early next week, but never trust me on things like that.

For the update after that, I've planned lots of cool stuff, which I will reveal one by one over the coming weeks. One thing I will reveal already is that the update will contain lots of new music, most of it related to towns. As you may remember, [Olvand's music is leitmotivic], which means all melodies represent some concept of the game. This is the theme that represents cities, in its bare form. I will let you hear many variations of this melody over the next few weeks!


If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].

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