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[Xantalos]

Come on guys, you proved in like fifteen threads that you can't discuss colored horses without breaking the rules.  Get that shit outta here.

I honestly don't know what you mean by that.

Perfect.

[Jalak]

Come on guys, you proved in like fifteen threads that you can't discuss colored horses without breaking the rules.  Get that shit outta here.

I honestly don't know what you mean by that.

Perfect.

Don't know what you mean by that, either.

Moving on, when a hero stumbles along your "home base" due to sheer curiosity, will they find out that you're there? Hell, is it even possible for a the world to find out who you are if you do absolutely nothing suspicious? is it a potentially good strategy in just making simple infiltration challenges without actually doing anything else until you have eyes and ears everywhere, or will the hero and nations be too powerful if you try "turtling" for so long like that?

[nenjin]

MLP jokes and or discussions tend to be verboten, because people can't take a joke or lay off making a joke.

As you said, moving on.

[TempAcc]

Say, are there plans to make the player able to corrupt and use whole nations, taking control of them directly or through agents? As in, turning a nation's leaders into your personal agents or having your agents take over a kingdom in a way or another, eliminate any opposition and then use that nation as a tool to your designs, akin to what sauron did in the third age with the men of harad/khand/rhun/etc.

Also, it would be interesting if there were other evils in the world, altough less powerful or more recent then you, that you could provoke or awaken, to make then cause havoc and thus shift attention from yourself. Something like "OH GOD THE EVIL MAGICAL ARMY OF GOLEMS CREATED BY THE WIZARD BLARAGLGLL SUDDENLY BECAME ACTIVE AND STARTED RAZING WHOLE CITIES LETS FORGET ALL THIS MYSTERIOUS LAND PLAGUE AND GO FIGHT THEM" and etc.

[Jalak]

Say, are there plans to make the player able to corrupt and use whole nations, taking control of them directly or through agents? As in, turning a nation's leaders into your personal agents or having your agents take over a kingdom in a way or another, eliminate any opposition and then use that nation as a tool to your designs, akin to what sauron did in the third age with the men of harad/khand/rhun/etc.

Also, it would be interesting if there were other evils in the world, altough less powerful or more recent then you, that you could provoke or awaken, to make then cause havoc and thus shift attention from yourself. Something like "OH GOD THE EVIL MAGICAL ARMY OF GOLEMS CREATED BY THE WIZARD BLARAGLGLL SUDDENLY BECAME ACTIVE AND STARTED RAZING WHOLE CITIES LETS FORGET ALL THIS MYSTERIOUS LAND PLAGUE AND GO FIGHT THEM" and etc.

The answers to both those questions are lying within this thread somewhere, so here's a summary for you.

The whole premise of eventually taking over the world practically evolves around the idea of corrupting nations and various other powers. Be aware, though, that corrupting the king doesn't automatically make his vassals and armies loyal to you; the idea is that you use him to manipulate his subjects for your own ends (whether it's committing genocide on their own people or doing nothing while society collapses around them). If corrupted people get found out, they may get "cured" or outright deposed. I suppose you can also corrupt the armies and the cities as well for total control, if that's what you want, but that may not be a good idea as your time and actions are a bit limited and concentrating on one specific region can let the rest of the world get ahead of you. Although, I'd imagine the heroes and light-loving nations would have a harder time "purging" the place of your influence and could be a pretty effective distraction from whatever else your doing, so there's that. You can also make those same corrupt leaders into "active" agents rather then remaining in their "sleeper" role, so long as you have room for them. Hell, you could probably corrupt a king, have him ground his own nation into dust, then have him go active and flee somewhere else when the light-bringers come knocking.

It's been said before that other elder gods got planned to fight you over who gets to be top dog, but were cut out due to technical constraints, but might be brought back in, give enough time and money. There are, however, some events later on in the game already that have ancient evil powers rise up and cause havoc, and you can manipulate them and make them join your cause just like any other power. One of the these evils mentioned is some death-knight named Baron Greywind (or something) who spawns later on at some ruined castle, raises a bunch of undead minions, then goes on a crusade against whatever culture he hates at the time. You can manipulate him to become an ally, a direct agent or just leave him be (though it has been stated that, without your intervention, his crusade will be doomed to failure eventually). It's also been stated that it's totally possible to shift the blame of all the bad things you've done on an agent or ally, so that if the world rallies together and destroys them, you'll be still hanging around, biding your strength to make a comeback  .

[TempAcc]

I see :v , guess I haven't been following this thread super well.

[nenjin]

To be fair, KDG has posted more details about how his game will work than most devs do even post-release. There's a lot of info to read through.

[KingDinosaurGames]

Jalak has a pretty damn good understanding of the game, and his answer is correct. 

As for stumbling on your base, depending on what you've been doing there may be a quest of varying strength to go investigate it - but if you have done NOTHING at your base they may simply wander on past - obliviously investigating other venues, especially if an area nearby has a quest.  However, even if you have remained completely silent in that region certain heroes pursue their own agenda of plunging into ancient ruins - in which case they may stumble upon you, even if they don't know what that means.  If your pursue this strategy you would want to keep an eye on those particular heroes, and eliminate/corrupt/distract them.

Turtling presents its own difficulties because the heroes are slowly building up the map - think of the dynamics of the game as a neutral state, with some chaos and some order - your agents try to tilt the world in the direction of chaos (or a more harmful order) and the heroes are generally endorsing order and cultural understandings.   You may find actions that would be easy at the start of the game become much harder if you let them have their way.  In addition, the sages of the world will begin to suspect your return regardless and engage themselves in research - and the Chosen One will rise even without your intervention. 

Update on our status: we've been revisiting our videos while we work on the Trailer.  We've just finished redoing Video 3 with the feedback received from the other videos, and we're on to the next few.  We also slightly altered the priority of the videos based on feedback.

Video 3 - Agent and Hero Combat
Trailer
Video 4 - Challenges and Events
Video 5 - Play Sample (I'll play through 15-25 turns of the game, and do my best to knock the world into chaos)
Video 6 - Military and War
Video 7 - In-Game Editor and Modding

KS still on schedule for the 22nd.  Demo will be the number one priority after Video 5 is released.

[jhxmt]

I'm incredibly eager to see those videos - particularly video 5.  There seems to be a lack of current games that make the player the 'puppetmaster in the shadows' type of force that TWS seems to be providing, and it's a genre/approach that I wish was more widely represented.  I also love how much information you've provided on the actual mechanics (both in this thread and in the first videos), it makes for really interesting reading! 

[Jalak]

Now that I've run out of questions to ask about the mechanics (so far) I might about ask about a little backstory, then.

You've already said that you took out the gods, religions and went for more static quality maps rather then loads of random generation, but what other sort of mechanics did you have near the start of this project that you also took out? Not in terms of big game changers like those two, but more on how you actually play the game, what information you got and how, that sort of thing.

Also, what compelled you and your other partner (who, until named, I am going to assume is Cthulu) to start this project in the first place? How long ago was that?

[thepodger]

Wolfram and Hart are the senior partners, of course.

[KingDinosaurGames]

So much work on the videos - we took in all the criticisms from the public as well as game journalists (who told us quite bluntly why it wasn't getting posted), so we're doing the trailer hand in hand with the recordings of the videos.  Feels like a waste of quality dev time but we know this is critical. 

Should have the Videos pumping out starting Monday. 

PROJECT HISTORY QUESTIONS?  oh man - well it's hard to say when this project actually started.  I quit my full time job almost a year and a half ago, to return to video game development (I worked on Palm Treo games WAY back in the day, as well as an aborted attempt to make a PC Strategy game about a decade ago) - we went through a prototyping phase and came up with three games we wanted to design, prototype, and playtest.  They were:

- Unnamed Space Game - Essentially a Battlestar Galactica simulator, you play as the Admiral of a fleet of very random components and must keep them together.  It leveraged a lot of the AI elements we are using in That Which Sleeps, including our systems of repressing desires, dealing with stress, and figuring out who you like/hate/love.  It focused more on the politics of leadership than the command and control you usually see (at the time, now a few games have come out/are coming that actually embrace this idea).

We were handling the technical requirements by having a SINGLE 3D Spaceship that we cut into for simple 2D rooms, which was satisfying - but we determined that the theme required graphical events which we weren't comfortable committing to given our limited art assets.  Shelved with limited assets and a simple test prototype created.

- The King is Dead - Heavily asymetrical HTML5 Board-Game type strategy game, used the same map look and feel as That Which Sleeps.  The unique element was in the characters you could control - the King dies leaving the Lord Protector of the realm who controls the provincial guard and nominally has control over the kingdom, but each actions he takes lowers his legitimacy making him seem more and more like a usurper, other factions such as Disgraced nobles who can call on exiled members and foreign powers to help them start with a massive war chest but no terrain, a Merchant's Guild faction just wants to control all the resources fo the kingdom and doesn't care who wins, and the eternally loyal Warden of the North controls the loyalty of the armies (and is the best commander), but has no economy to speak of (he relies on subsidies from the Lord Protector at start).   

Heavily influenced by CDG Board Games (Legitimacy and Usurper status are almost word for word from Successors), we wanted to take the best of the board game world and bring in what a PC version can offer.  Abandoned because monetize and the game itself wasn't as rewarding to work on as the other alternatives.  This one is actually in a playable state.

- That Which Sleeps, which you've heard tons about.  It started out as a "do we do a mobile pandemic-style spread corruption game?" which we ended up saying 'This is fun to play but not fun to make' so we went all out and made it into the kind of PC Strategy we've always wanted to play.  So many changes occured in the prototyping and later playtesting stage - originally you had "actions points" to use X agents, the agents were generic and repeatable, minions didn't exist, heroes had large posses of allies, combat was just X vs Y, at one point all actions were narrative choices like in KODP, and originally the few "unique agents" had their own plotlines that worked against you and each other (modeled after Wheel of Time).   One of the biggest mechanical changes is with Challenges - Challenges take time to complete, originally it was more like a standard 4x where your actions are immediate.  Testing with heroes gave us the idea that "plots take time" which gives you a much more thematic feel of playing as evil. 

It was important to us that we settle on a game that was feasible for us to make, we wanted to ensure that the game played out on either a single screen or a map - that way the majority of our time can be spent on the back-end, making a compelling AI and some great content.   Some of the other ideas that didn't make it to prototype stage were great, but we didn't think a 2 man team could accomplish them.

We've always wanted to go back to game making - we both have had good jobs in our industries so we saved up and decided to go for it.  We'd been designing/making/playing board games with our group for a long time, and increasingly leveraging technical aspects to spruce them up.  Only made sense to bring some of these ideas to life.

Also DMing for over a decade, so many plots that I want to see brought to life. 

THANKS FOR ASKING - I'm definitely going to put "Jalak the Chronicler" as a Hero event somewhere.

[Xantalos]

Why weren't they getting posted? The videos, I mean.

[Jalak]

Why weren't they getting posted? The videos, I mean.

Please tell me that one of them said that the idea of playing a completely evil being with no redemption and played completely straight was deemed too "unfriendly to the kids".

By the way, how's the balancing of the Elder Gods going? Is the Death God back, or are you still sorting that out?

Also, thank you thank you thank you! You just make my week for that, especially since I didn't need to back the kickstarter or anything! My plans are all coming together, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!
Granted, these thoughts hit a bit of a snag when I was totally-not-bragging about this to my brother, when he turned around and basically said "Wait, if you're in the game as the Elder God and an official hero, does that mean you've been doomed to killing your evil/good counterpart for an eternity?" Well, damn, when you put that way...

[Scoops Novel]

It focused more on the politics of leadership than the command and control you usually see (at the time, now a few games have come out/are coming that actually embrace this idea).

Which would these be?

I wonder about how this game will give you a sense of self. I can't help but look at the game as having a surprisingly good way of making abstraction fit with roleplaying. A lot of strategy games tell you your a commander, but instantly afterwards you as any kind of conceivable entity are replaced with an untouchable unaccountable presence. Actually playing as a meddling ghost helps, but you see what I'm getting at.