Day and Night

After playing Minecraft for a bit, I realized that night time has been widely underused and neglected by games. The first few times playing Minecraft, night was a scary time for me. I would close myself in a tiny dirt cave and pray a skeleton didn't shoot me while I looked out the window in hopes of daylight. Anyway, my point is that night should be dangerous and exciting.

During day time, everything is relatively peaceful in "safe" zones. As long as you are paying attention, and not adventuring out alone in profitable hunting locations, you will most likely be just fine. Most things you need to do can be done around NPC and player camps where there are many people at any given time. Most of these locations will be "protected" by difficult NPCs and hopefully good aligned players. Even hunting mobs is less dangerous, because, my idea is that there will be very few roaming monsters during the day. If you enter their camp that is one thing, but as you're exploring, you won't run into too many monsters or dangerous animals. Also, the majority of NPC bounty hunters will hunt during the day, so you will likely never see a player opposite the alignment of the region.

At night, the monsters come out, and most the bounty hunters go to sleep. It will be easier to hide and sneak at night, maybe even +50%, which can protect you, but most of the time it will protect the PKs. Somehow, skills should raise faster and rewards should be much higher, but the risks could be even higher. I realize that it doesn't make a lot of sense for the rewards to be higher at night, since, if you go searching at night for flowers in real life, you will not have as much success. But, this is a game, and I feel it is a good approach.

Night will last up to 4 hours within a 24 hour period (numbers would probably to change). And I know what you're thinking, "But it would suck to log in only to find it is night time if you just want to relax." Well, I agree, and I have thought about this quite a bit. My solution is simple, the player chooses when it is day and when it is night. There will essentially be two instances of the world, with a few things shared between. A player will only be able to switch to night mode one time in each real life day, and can only be in for 4 hours each day.

I really like the idea but, already, we run into a few complications.

• Q: If I chop down a tree at day time, will it grow back before night, or will it still be chopped down when I go to night mode? If the latter, what happens if a player chops down a tree at night, and I'm in day mode? Do I see the tree fall even though nobody is there to chop it down?
  
  A: Well, I don't really have a good answer for this. Part of me says it is okay that they are not shared between modes, but another part of me says they should just regrow twice per day. I am pretty sure UO's trees spawn in more often than that anyway.
  
• Q: Won't this turn into the Felucca and Trammel of UO? Why wouldn't everyone just stay in day mode?
  
  A: Well, I would really like for that not to be the case. There are a few things different with this system that may contribute to a different result. 1) Land ownership is shared between modes. 2) Rewards (loot drops) are higher at night. 3) Monsters don't really spawn during the day, so fighters will essentially be required to go to night mode at least every once and a while. 4) Caves and dungeons will not be affected by modes, it will always be "night" mode in them. 5) Probably the biggest: You can still get PK'ed during the day, particularly by covert blue PKs (you'd be their first murder). You can especially get pick-pocketed.

Well, that is all for tonight. I am still in favor of night mode, but the first issue is still getting to me. Perhaps it is enough to simply make dungeons and caves be the night mode. Of course I'd still have a night cycle, and maybe it could still be more dangerous at night without having the two instances of the world. It needs to be designed quite a bit more, and I need some feedback from other people.

Skills and Macroing

Creating a design that allows characters to have skills, but does not drive players to AFK macro has been a major goal for me. It is such a high priority, that removing skills altogether is still a consideration for the design. However, skills are still important to me, so I am going to try everything possible to keep them in the game.

To combat macroing, I have read about, and come up with a few ideas.

• CAPTCHA - I know what you're thinking, and I completely agree with you. How lame would it be for you to have to type in random characters every so often while you're mining or fishing? Although it would be terrible, there are a few games that employ this method. I just think we can do better.
• Player Policing - This involves a player going up to another and "tapping" on his shoulder. If the other player does not respond within a time-frame, then they must be macroing, so they are free game to kill. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this because I walk away from the computer a lot while I'm playing games, so sometimes I can't respond in time.
• Free-for-all PvP - While this may solve the problem in some cases, it is not ideal, because a lot of the time, even if you want to play a "realistic" sandbox MMO where you can do whatever you want, sometimes you just want to relax. I don't even know why I listed this, because it's not something I will consider doing, since I believe in safe zones.
• Interactivity/Minigames - This is the most promising idea I've come up with, though I'm sure it is not a new idea. It needs to be "fun", but not require a whole lot of thought or focus. For mining and lumberjacking, I was thinking of something like Fable II, where a slider bounces back and forth and you have to press the button at the right time. For herbalism maybe something like Thief III's lockpicking, where you have to twist and align roots to dig out. I'm not too worried about fishing or cooking since those will be secondary skills, but if the system was in, why not come up with something small? It would be nice to get anyone's feedback on this idea.
• Time-based - Just like EVE online, you set a skill to train, and wait, even while offline. This isn't a bad system, but I would prefer something a little more interactive. And why not just have both? Maybe you can set a skill to train before you log out and your character can study it while you're offline. Things like hunting, mining, fishing, etc could even collect a few resources or cash at the same time.

Small Technical Renovation

I haven't had much time to work on the game recently, but it has been on my mind the entire time. However, it is not just time that has been slowing development. When designing the item and object modules, I was following the rule that most MMOs and even RPGs follow, which is that objects are in the 3D world, and items are in your inventory and equipped to characters. I did not take into consideration that in this game, the player can place items on the ground, so they are also objects in the 3D world. This oversight has caused a loss in productivity, because it means I have to redesign the way the inventory works a little bit so objects and items are the same things, but can also be hidden in characters' inventories. While I don't think it will be a huge task, it still causes me to lose momentum because it is stopping me from working on everything else, since everything relies on the object/item system.