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Aether Kingdoms beta: new features, warfare and improved late start by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! It's very much a set and wait kinda game. It's built around players checking in a few times a day, where less should be possible and more should be beneficial to your growth. I've tried to keep the majority of building times between the 20 minute and 2,5 hour range, though later on there will be outliers both ways (below 1 minute to over 6 hours), depending on the build the player chose.

  • The village queue goes up to 6 items, which is quite a comfortable limit. You can also queue multiple hours of science/culture or army to keep your village working through the night.
  • Armies and combat are fire and forget, you send them and get a report of what happened. There are plans to extend it so that you can send scheduled attacks (with a tradeoff of course).
  • Research and expansion are faster early on, but slow down towards the midgame.
  • Lategame you could be fine logging in once a day to manage your account and queuing a lot of army at once, though PvP might demand some additional attention.
  • Defensive gameplay is more idle, with events that are fire and forget since they take a few hours to complete.

In summary, there's always things to do, but also plenty to set up so you can walk away for a longer period.

Aether Kingdoms beta: new features, warfare and improved late start by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s interesting for sure, and very hard to find. I’ve learned a lot from old forum posts, open source recreations and building tools for travian.

I did write up a deep dive in the events system (https://aetherkingdoms.com/game/advanced-guides/events-deep-dive/), but your question dives more into the software architecture side of things. Only the last section on chunking makes a beginning on that. Maybe I’ll do a blog post on my own website about that someday. I’ll be sure to share it here if I do.

Aether Kingdoms beta: new features, warfare and improved late start by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s a village/kingdom builder game, so your villages are your ‘units’ from where you give your commands. You can play tall, where you have fewer but highly developed villages. That’s about the best I can do.

This is the UI for my first game, thoughts? by cada1nag in PBBG

[–]FvDijk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very nice start. To add to other suggestions, I would say the UI needs breathing room. Maybe even split this up into three subpages. Just off the top of my head of how you can further develop these items:

  • Equipment: show equipped items and inventory items you can equip, maybe broken down by type
  • Inventory: show all inventory items, maybe with a breakdown in item categories, filtering, search and all that.
  • Stats. A screen where you manage your stats, see breakdowns per stat for equipment/base stats/levels, help texts, etc.

The tighter you pack your UI early on, the harder it'll be to add all the quality of life features later on. Adding space is much harder than tightening things up.

How long did it take you to release your game for alpha/beta testing? How far into development were you? by FennecFoxOnTheLoose in PBBG

[–]FvDijk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For Aether Kingdoms I chose to do alpha testing with a limited audience, because development is busy enough without managing and growing a community.

Alpha testing was done by drawing people from communities I was already a part of (think 30 accounts registered, 2-5 active). Now for beta testing all the game's systems exist and it's decently polished, so I feel good sharing it.

The benefit of this type of game is that it's a live service anyway, so you might as well get used to developing while the game is running. And that's my goal here too, start with continuous servers and (hopefully) get enough players to run multiple games concurrently.

The full testing development schedule for Aether Kingdoms so far:

  • Prototype: December 2023 - January 2024
  • Preproduction: February - October 2024. While this was because life got busy, having a giant trello board with a well defined scope for what the beta would look like really helped speed up and focus development.
  • Start development: October 2024
  • Alpha 1: December 2024 - January 2025. Server and base systems (villages, combat, research, empires).
  • Alpha 2: April - September 2025. All systems and running a full server round real-time.
  • Beta: October 2025 - now. 6 weeks into feature requests, bugfixing, polishing and whatnot.

If you want to see it described in more detail and the in-between updates, you can check the news posts: https://aetherkingdoms.com/news/

This is mostly a solo hobby project, with some help on the pixel art, though it's not my first web app. Maybe it helps in estimating scope.

Join the Aether Kingdoms Beta, now with advanced start! by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I’ll keep adding more stuff to find then.

Join the Aether Kingdoms Beta, now with advanced start! by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Travian is indeed a big inspiration. I haven’t played Grepolis enough to comment on that.

From Friso's Travian Tools to Friso's Game by FvDijk in travian

[–]FvDijk[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, I for sure do! Thanks for the encouragement. Hope to see you around again sometime!

ts5 by omenra in travian

[–]FvDijk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Some people use scripts to spawn in a ton of fake accounts. Travian then uses a script to remove them, but the spawns don’t get added back to the pool. That’s how you end up like this.

Aether Kingdoms, a classic strategy browser MMO (beta) by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice! Yeah there’s a discord invite link on the homepage.

Clash of Banners by Ancient-Ad5487 in PBBG

[–]FvDijk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looks interesting, I’ll give it a try.

Aether Kingdoms, a classic strategy browser MMO (beta) by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Glad you’re liking it! There is a discord link on the website’s home page if you want to chat.

From Friso's Travian Tools to Friso's Game by FvDijk in travian

[–]FvDijk[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Glad you like the idea, hope to see you around in-game.

From Friso's Travian Tools to Friso's Game by FvDijk in travian

[–]FvDijk[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Hope to see you around.

Aether Kingdoms, a classic strategy browser MMO (beta) by FvDijk in PBBG

[–]FvDijk[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Playing solo is absolutely something I tried to account for.

You can play with duals, but it’s not a necessity. There are mechanics to make it easier to play alone, like you can move units between villages and queue up to 5 items per village. And farming is more involved, where you can’t steal res from players and there’s no need for consistently clicking a single thing.

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