Prepare yourself, adventurer, for a journey into the wild lands of Hivaea!
A little background | Ups and Downs
I'm @thatsweeneyguy, and I started developing Thrive or Die a little over four years ago. I've been a hobbyist game developer since childhood, but the games I've created have always been for family and friends to enjoy, and I never had the gumption to actually publish any of my games to the world. Thrive or Die was intended to be the first game I ever took public, and the idea was always for it to be in the public eye from the start. When I joined Steemit about three years ago, it was the perfect opportunity for me to get the game in front of real people. I worked on the game for a while, and blogged about my progress. Then real life happened, and the project was put on the shelf to be picked up another day.
That day has come, and it's time to see Thrive or Die become a reality! I rummaged through the old notebooks and laptop, and collected every bit of creative work I had put in. I started from scratch, and decided to use the same game engine I had worked with for two decades, mostly because that's what I was familiar with. After conversations on the forums and with the devs of the engine, I learned that it will not have the capability to bring some of the core ideas of this game to fruition, so I began the search for a Plan B.
It took me a while to narrow down the engine I'd use. It had to have the capability of creating a multiplayer game in a top-down 2D world, and it needed to be able to talk to the blockchain. That's really not much to ask. After looking at options like Unity, Unreal Engine and others, I found Plan G; Godot.
Why Godot?
First and foremost, it's open-source. If the engine can't do something, it can likely be given the capability. I feel this will be important for long-term support of the project. Aside from that, and kinda most importantly, it's free, whereas engines like Unity are only free until you start making money. Godot already has a strong community, and it's quickly growing for a number of reasons. This is great, because while I'm rewriting Thrive or Die from the ground up, I'm learning how to do so in a completely novel programming language, GDScript, so I'll be leaning heavily on others to learn how to implement the features necessary to bring the ideas in my head to your computer.
Okay, that's all great, but what exactly is Thrive or Die?
Thrive or Die is, or will be, an open-world survival rpg where players are charged with rebuilding a broken realm. Destroyed years before in a cataclysm know as "The Falling", when a giant rock fell from the sky, the lands of Hivaea where not only torn asunder killing nearly all living beings, but tainted by an ancient and dark magic. The game is heavily inspired by tabletop rpgs like Dungeons & Dragons, as well as modern survival crafting games like Minecraft. Players will find themselves in an open and wild world, where the actions of anyone have the potential of impacting the world as a whole. With enormous attention to detail and realism, I intend to offer a somewhat difficult, but rewarding experience for anyone who embraces it.
The world itself is a mash up of hand-crafted geography, with the environment being layered in with procedural generation. This means from one instance, or server, of the game to the next, the islands players traverse will always be shaped the same. The entrances to caves, and the slopes of mountains, will be in the same locations geographically. From there, the random environment is grown. The "best place" to mine a particular ore will almost certainly be in a different location on a different server, and could only be located on certain islands, due to the way they were generated when the world is created. Where a given enemy is more likely to spawn may be rooted in the geography, but the best hunting spots could be completely different. This gives players a fresh feeling every time they start in a new instance of the game.
In the very beginning, I still want everyone to be able to feel what I'm building, as it's built. In these early stages, the game will be lacking multiplayer functionality. Bringing the game into that realm is something I'll have to prepare for, and will only be successful if the game is already "fun" to play alone. I'm working tirelessly getting the core functions fleshed out in order to get the very first playable version, albeit incredibly light, ready for download. I want everyone to have a voice in how the ideas, functions, and features get implemented, so look forward to plenty of public polls and participation rewards directly from the @thriveordie account here on HIVE!
Speaking of HIVE...
One of the "core ideas" for Thrive or Die is a player-to-player marketplace where in-game items can be exchanged for cryptocurrency. The initial plan was Bitcoin, but about a year after I first began writing this game, I discovered Steemit, and it changed my life. After only a week, I was hooked, and from there on, I made a promise to bring something great to the community that had given me opportunities I never thought possible. With recent events, that community came together to adapt and evolve, and with the development of Thrive or Die now moving forward, I'm proud to call HIVE its home.
I will be starting up a new HIVE-exclusive Devlog moving forward, documenting the progress I'm making learning the ins and outs of Godot, and taking Thrive or Die from an idea, to something you can play, to something you can earn money for playing!
Sorry for the long-winded post!
I'm guilty of this a lot, but I think it only shows the sort of detail your going to get about the actual progress of the game. If you've stuck it out and read the entire thing, I greatly thank you, and invite you to leave your thoughts in the comments! Your genuine feedback is fuel for moving forward, and shaping this vision into what it will become. I hope you'll follow along, and read all about what's cooking in the kitchen. I promise I'll try and make it worth your time!
looking forward to somedetails:)
Going through my notes, and getting prepped to start the new devblog within a couple days 😁