Do you golem?

"The ancient teachers of this science promised impossibilities, & performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little.. but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, & their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, & show how she works in her hiding places.. they have discovered how the blood circulates, & the nature of the air we breathe, & they have acquired new & almost unlimited powers"

A bit more than 9 months later, here's the name of the game: Golemizer

Finding a name was probably one of the hardest thing in this project (well, beside having to code with a machine I should have thrown out the window a long time ago...). It's not as fancy as Chasing Tortoise but I feel it sums up well what the game is about.

Players will play the role of mad scientists experimenting with life and mechanic to create creatures roaming the world, spreading chaos on their path: Golems

The main aspect of the game is crafting. Crafting golems, houses, furniture and such. The second aspect of the game is the ongoing war between the creatures created by players.

Once a golem is created, it will roam the world and do as it wants, even when it's creator is offline. However, when players are online, golems can also be used as pets, allowing involvement of players in combat.

While all the mechanic allowing players to get into direct combat with weapons is part of the framework, I decided to let this aspect for now, a day still having only 24 hours in it. I'm keeping this for after release, allowing players to play characters à la Van Helsing.

That's not much info for now but more in the next days/weeks.

Oh and I'll probably be looking for more beta testers in a not so distant futur so stay tuned!

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Silent blog means busy working

A lot of small stuff being done like adding items, creating new skills to craft them, expanding the world, adding NPCs, ...

The most important is probably the "Welcome" zone for new players. I want to get a solid 10 minutes of play/exploration that will help new players to figure what the game is about. After those 10 minutes, they should know enough to start enjoying the game.

It means building an in-game tutorial (short and not telling too much) but also making sure the place where new players will appear have enough stuff around for them to get started. This means basic skills trainers, mine, trees to cut and a non-risky combat experience. I recently added roads to lead players to points of interest instead of letting them loose in the wild.

Once this part is done, I'll probably have enough stuff to invite more testers. I'd like to finish the intro zone this week so I can shift gears and reach my "end of spring" objective for release.

Till then, here's a small excerpt from the skills tree:

- Carpenter (apprentice)
----- Wood basket
----- Bench
----- Table
----- Wood module (small)
----------Wood module (medium)
---------------Wood module (large)
----- Carpenter (intermediate)
---------- Kitchen counter
---------- Carpenter (expert)
--------------- Architect (apprentice)
-------------------- Small houses
-------------------- Architect (intermediate)
------------------------- Medium houses
------------------------- Pub
------------------------- Architect (expert)
------------------------------ Big houses

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Beta screenshot - New buildings

The last beta update pushed a lot of new data for new buildings. As mentioned before, all buildings will be crafted by players.

So far, there's 3 small houses models, 1 medium and 2 large. More are to come but I'll keep them for later. This update expanded the number of zone types available to add more buildings so it will be much faster to add new ones.

Here's the screenshot of the starting zone for now (click to zoom). There's even a cute bunny hopping around:

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