I realize that this post was intended it seems to talk about what could help Terulia form a more mechanical / 'idea brainstorming' point of view, but really, all that kind of stuff is what Gaku's best at already -- what he'll tweak and fix and make better and tweak and fix and make better and so on and so forth as long as he has an ounce of care about the game, which seems to be his 'baby' so I'd say that'll be for a long time yet.

No, when you ask me "what would make Terulia better? What would make it even better an experience than FFO ever was? What would make you want to play it?" my answer would be simple;

Like Dricien said, a healthy playerbase, as well as a healthy amount of content.

Frankly these are the only real reasons FFO became less and less popular and would be the only real reasons Terulia wouldn't become the next (and possibly only) big thing on BYOND from the time of release to years down the road. I can at least speak for myself and *most likely* most other players who've stopped playing FFO when I say I only really stopped playing because:
A) nothing truly new and fresh was ever added save a tiny amount of overworld area and a small dungeon since Irendi in, what, 2005? 2006? and
B) the playerbase UTTERLY stagnated. It became a tiny community that was easy to 'rule' by blaxcrew and such, but when you think about it blaxcrew was only Norkia 2.0, and people didn't quit en masse (just whined) when Norkia was around. Both were groups of tight-knit friends who shared, communicated very well, knew the game well and played extremely often to become very powerful; but Norkia was ~5 people vs. the rest of a 50+-player-on-peak-times playerbase. We picked out people we didn't like and went and hunted them down, or we camped a certain 'squeeze spot' for a party we knew was coming, or something like that; sure, we managed to fight off unlikely odds a few times, but we couldn't have handled it if even a so-so sized chunk of the server decided to go after us. But Blaxcrew? They have had, what, HALF the playerbase of the entire server at any given time, it feels like. There's no real logical way to defeat them save bringing new people in to the server, who end up quitting BECAUSE of them, a generally low playerbase, knowing no new content's ever released anymore, etc. So...

Before Terulia goes public, we need to make sure of two things; 1) it has enough content to satiate a healthy population for at least a few months, and then a good, meaty update at *LEAST* once a year that adds new content, like FFO in the old days; 2) it WILL HAVE a healthy population. Like, since it's not under any copyright, we need to advertise; we need to tell everyone who might have even a slight, passing interest in checking it out for a few minutes; we need to make sure the population is THERE. We need to make sure it has a healthy and varied enough population that a little group like Knizia isn't able to iron-fist the whole game, no matter what.

There's your elias post, letha. You're welcome.

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to save some headache for gamu... I'm posting this word for word so if he wishes to, he can copy/paste his reply as well if he wishes. though I do need to point out: ya... most forums don't require you to subscribe to a forum... it's automatically done if you can see it... which is what completely threw me off... so as far as the forum problem goes, that's obviously fixed now. but the rest of it I did want to put up here where it belonged.

----message begins----

I have looked over everywhere I can find, and have found absolutely no way to post... or anything stating what one must do to be allowed to post... so am completely confused at this point and must assume either a: after going through dozens of game forums before... I have finally found one that is so completely off the wall it is impossible to find the post button without help... or that you disable any posting ability of any kind to anyone that has not been allowed to do so previously (and never put somewhere on how to be allowed to do so either...)

so... I am messaging you directly.
1st off, I realize you've never heard of me... that's fine. suffice it to say I've really enjoyed your work on FFO, and was really sad to hear that you are discontinuing it (and possibly terulia at this point as well... I think) and really do wish you luck in your post graduation situation.

but the reason for the message is to answer the question posted about what about terulia is still not better then FFO (and by inference, what can be done to make it better)

unfortunately, I never did actually try terulia before... only FFO (and upon trying it now was sad to see that there is some weird bug preventing all monster spawns of any kind) but from what I had been reading, I think I can offer some insights...

1: FFO didn't try to force you into parties. it was something that happened naturally, and the game would, by it's own design, ramp up the difficulty in the form of amount of monster spawns, to compensate. terulia attempts to force players to form parties... but you still have the same fundamental ramping... so really, instead of making it harder to force people into grouping up... you've just simply made it harder period.

2: FFO starts you off feeling fairly powerful. it makes you want to go out and blow stuff (monsters) up. and it was when you went further out to hunt more powerful monsters for better rewards, that you started feeling the limitations of what you can and cannot do. when even starting out you are only presented with what you can only just barely manage to kill... it takes all the fun out of it. your game system, is designed to be fast paced, and it's what it is best at. while I haven't seen it firsthand, I see no way slowing the action down like it sounds like you did in terulia would have good effects.

3: byond and advertising. byond did the advertising for you... they no longer are because of the C&D scare. I 100% agree you should move on with terulia... but you really do need to continue growing it. if byond is limiting what you can do... you need to look into another engine that can. then, once you have something big enough, you need to advertise. one thing I would recommend before you do though... make it a standalone program, whether that means it starts byond for you and goes directly into the game through the same shortcut, or the game is truly standalone... it will make things a lot easier all around if you do. this will also allow you to reach out to places like newgrounds and steam.

4: once you have something big enough setup to call your own... get rid of the ambigous stat references. when someone is playing your game, they don't want to 'guess' something is better. trust me on that one... I've played dozens, if not more, online games of all kinds... there's a reason why every single one of them will at least show when something is better or not. but there's another reason for that.

5: as much as it pains me to say this (I'm a huge advocate for free games, lol), once you do get it on your own... you need to setup some kind of payment system... as I'm sure your well aware of, bills have to be paid. I can tell you from personal experience, that most people have no problem with a game having things you pay for ingame... as long as it meets 1 of 3 requirements: 1: what you pay for is cosmetic only. 2: if it does affect gameplay, it does not overpower the person to where someone that does not pay, can no longer win. 3: you can get what you pay for, without paying for it... it just takes longer to get it (but not required to get to continue playing).

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reply to Banaman:

0. What you probably didn't realize is that this isn't a forum; it is in fact several independent forums.

copied:

1. Terulia actually doesn't force players into parties at all and is balanced for solo play. If you haven't talked to Bennett, then I could see why you might think it's a lot more difficult (he gives you 1, then 2 more, NPC companions).

2. Action in Terulia does in fact need to be sped up, so I agree with you there. However, difficulty ramping is a problem for balance reasons, and players are not intended to become godlike a la FFO in Terulia.

3. Once it is minimally playable, the game will be advertized.

4. I'm not sure I agree with you here, as this isn't designed to be a typical MORPG.

5. There will eventually be paid features, specifically domain- and improvement-related, but that's not really a priority at this point. Right now, the only way this game makes money is through the few pennies per day it draws in via forum advertisements. (which is fine, given the very small community)

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Grameramera wrote:

balanced for solo play

/giggle

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Dr. Letha wrote:

Grameramera wrote:

balanced for solo play

/giggle

Grameramera wrote:

2. Action in Terulia does in fact need to be sped up, so I agree with you there. However, difficulty ramping is a problem for balance reasons, and players are not intended to become godlike a la FFO in Terulia.

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Dr. Letha wrote:

Grameramera wrote:

balanced for solo play

/giggle

The ability to solo and the stat progression of characters are only loosely connected - they do not have an inherent correlation when we view those two factors alone. There are a lot of other important factors to take into account.

Why the hell does your anchor tag have a class? I haven't seen that HTML structure in eons.

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Shane wrote:

Why the hell does your anchor tag have a class? I haven't seen that HTML structure in eons.

They don't; are you confusing hyperlinks for anchors?

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Grameramera wrote:

Shane wrote:

Why the hell does your anchor tag have a class? I haven't seen that HTML structure in eons.

They don't; are you confusing hyperlinks for anchors?

I have no idea. I'm really confused now.

As an aside, clicking usernames take you to a page that just has a 1 on it. http://www.terulia.com/?u=Gakumerasara

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reply to Shane:

Damn, I only ever click my own name and had thought terulia.com was telling me I'm "NUMBER ONE!"...

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Professor wrote:

reply to Shane:

Damn, I only ever click my own name and had though terulia.com was telling me I'm "NUMBER ONE!"...

I don't see how you could come to that conclusion since you don't have as many posts as I do.

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Shane wrote:

Professor wrote:

reply to Shane:

Damn, I only ever click my own name and had though terulia.com was telling me I'm "NUMBER ONE!"...

I don't see how you could come to that conclusion since you don't have as many posts as I do.

god you're a ***

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sexEboy69 wrote:

Shane wrote:

Professor wrote:

reply to Shane:

Damn, I only ever click my own name and had though terulia.com was telling me I'm "NUMBER ONE!"...

I don't see how you could come to that conclusion since you don't have as many posts as I do.

god you're a ***

Why thank you. I spend hours in my basement, scheming up posts for these forums to maximize smugness.

Alternatively, I could be joking.

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semi random question for you gaku... has a little to do with this...

with your development on terulia and some people (myself included) suggesting to look up another engine to work with other then byond...

have you considered making terulia compatible as a smartphone app? byond is old enough that I used to play games on it fine on dialup (ya, remember that pia connection? I sure still do...) so I know for a fact most modern day smartphones would be more then enough to run it.

and I'm sure a lot of people would love to have an mmo like terulia/ffo they could play anytime anywhere they wanted to. with it being grid based already... I can't imagine it would be very hard gameplay wise to make it compatible.

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reply to Banaman:

terrible idea

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Banaman wrote:

so I know for a fact most modern day smartphones would be more then enough to run it.

The smartphone might be fine to run it but the internet connection is also a huge factor that I doubt would be satisfied for enough people.

Another important part of FFO/Terulia "gameplay" is communication with others (and everything else that shows up in the output box), which is a huge pain to include in a smartphone app when you need all that space for the map and HUD, slow typing aside.

I could see it working for a tablet, but those are trash.

tl;dr:
Cea wrote:

reply to Banaman:

terrible idea

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Hello! I dropped in to see if Gaku was still working on this game.

It looks like he is but the forum is kind of hard to navigate.

He might not remember me but I used to do some pixel art for the game before I fell off the face of the Earth. I just wanted to say hey and see whats up and how things were going.





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Ello long time, I know who you are MFlanga.
He's around but busy with his life, he is working on terulia but slowly, he will check here eventually. :D

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reply to Mflanagan:

Hey, long time no see! I saw your message and was looking to message you a while ago but couldn't find your contact info (and then forgot that you had posted here!) I'm working on it sporadically. Let me know if you have any questions or want to talk at some point.

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Hey! Wow I promised myself I'd check back to see if you replied as often as I could but of course, half a year later here I am...

I just wanted to say hey and catch up, my email is tiestotaku@gmail.com drop me a line sometime maybe we can chat!

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Do people still think Terulia is going to come out? haha

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