The Ancients

[Azkanan]

So I've been playing Zomboid a lot lately and just noticed this section... so why not? Kudos to Indie Stone for supporting other Indie Games on their forum!

 

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The Ancients is a games project I've been developing for six years and of late is finally coming to fruition with the help of EBrown. Whilst I myself handle the graphics, EBrown is handling the programming - building the engine from the ground up in C#.

 

At length, The Ancients is a historical 2D Top-down survivor sandbox simulation MMORPG slash Tactical.

 

The aim of the game is to survive and thrive in a natural world that begins anew. The only human interference will be made by you, the players. By your meddling you can, if you chose to, build custom houses by-tile, form settlements, absorb others, expand into a nation and lead it to glory - or sit back and designate a council to take over the growth of the settlement. Succession laws, legal laws and punishments can be set at the time of creation.

 

On the other hand, you can lay traps, hunt wildlife and live on your own or with friends.

 

There's so much we're putting into Ancients that I've always had difficulty covering it all. But suffice to say, we're making it as immersive as possible.

 

Everything in The Ancients is player-made. We are only creating the world and the naturally-occuring things. We are only creating resources and what resources can be created into. For example, cooking. We are creating ingredients and what phase they can be used in. The recipe is completely up to the player; quantity and outcome, able to save that recipe and mass-create it in the future.

 

Weapons; we create recipes for a sword to be 'hilt' and 'blade'. It's down to the player what resource is used for it, and what quality blade/hilt they used to make it - and likewise, what what was used to make the blade and hilt.

 

In any case, here's the table of contents from the Design Document.

 

The Interface.

Main In-Game UI

The Encyclopaedia.

 

The Hero.

Introduction.

Inventory.

Equipment

Needs, Attributes.

Disease, Illness, Stati

Nutrition.

Skills.

Identity.

Religion & Omens.

Family.

Character Personality.

Business Management

Settlements.

Nations.

Guilds.

Abilities & Experiences.

Character Portrait

Privies & Bathing.

Crafting.

Zones.

Construction.

Terraforming.

Vehicles & Transports.

Player Land Protection.

 

Combat

Damage Tracking.

Duels.

Minor Combat

Major Combat

Combat Development Notes.

 

The World.

Variations of Time.

Weather & Moon Cycle.

Seasons.

Natural Disasters.

Grass Trampling.

World Layers.

Communication.

Item Design.

Economy.

Questing.

 

The Actors (Non-playable Characters)

NPC Aging.

NPC Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Slavery.

Actor Disposition (Relations)

Actor Personalities.

Business AI.

Organisations.

Pets.

Wild Creatures.

Wild Bandits.

Mythical Beings.

 

 

I periodically post any small updates onto Twitter, and in the future I'll post any larger updates onto the forums.

 

 

The below is an early mock of generally how the in-game will look.

 

 

 

Finally, one of the main features of Ancients is the world size. I can imagine some people asking, 'Why on Earth that size?' to it. The answer to which is immersiveness. Solitary players can live in solitude, whilst sociable players can follow the latest rumours and newest roads to the player-made settlements.

 

Short answer? 458km².

 

 

Let me explain properly in this image.

[VikiDikiRUS]

Looks great!

 

Мне нравиться это!

 

PS: Russian translate?

PSS: What about towns?

[Azkanan]

Player-made. Though, we are going to have Rome built by us (the devs), then handed over to NPCs - totally by the systems in place, rather than a map editor or anything.

 

Should make for a more natural appeal.

 

As for translations, we haven't even considered that yet. Most like just in English for now.

[zombo]

This sounds really cool.