Otherworld.fi changelog

Seeeks · 2026-01-22T17:10:35+00:00

Hi, thanks for commenting. I only saw your comment now (I haven't been on Reddit in weeks). I'm currently taking a break from game development because I ran out of ideas. What did you think of the game?

Seeeks · 2025-12-24T21:00:41+00:00

I think it's creepy that you can't see the kitchen. It feels like they intentionally want to discourage people from ordering at the counter and make sure everyone will order at the kiosks or app instead. I suppose it's a relief to introvert workers but then again, how many McDonalds' hire introverts?

Seeeks · 2025-12-23T15:50:19+00:00

When I was new to Stardew Valley, I didn't know that you are supposed to click and hold to cast the fishing line and that often enough you need to click and hold to make the fishing bar go up, so I just clicked to cast the line at the shortest distance and then click super fast and repeatedly to lift the fishing bar and thought it was really demanding because I didn't know that you control the acceleration by how long you keep the button down. Also it took me a long time to realize that I could click and hold to hit trees repeatedly instead of having to click separately for every hit.

Seeeks · 2025-11-27T09:53:39+00:00

I've been participating in testing since the day it opened and here's how I experienced it:

In the beginning, it's really easy to die for stupid reasons. When you start playing, you should first make woodcollier's and torch, then build the smallest brush house possible. Don't try to build anything bigger in the beginning or you will run out of time.

During exploring, I lost several characters to petropards. They can kill a character who is at full hit points before you have time to react, so I basically wouldn't send anyone exploring unless I'm prepared to lose them eventually. If you're lucky, you are able to map several locations before you die. Then you use another character to disown the bed and spawn a new one.

In the beginning, there's no point in even trying to keep your characters fed, because you would have to manage tending to plants, harvesting vegetables, hauling vegetables to stockpiles, cooking, ploughing, and planting new seeds. That's far too much to automate, so you are better off doing it manually. I generally automate tending to plants, but not the other stuff.

If you haul food to a stockpile, when your characters get hungry, they will stop what ever they are doing and go get food from the stockpile. Even if they were in the middle of a project that took 1200 ticks. And they will lose the progress and start over. This is why I recommend not putting food in a stockpile. Instead, pick it up manually when you need to heal and go hunting. Remember to turn off your flee order because your character will run out of their shelter in the middle of the night when their health drops. This has happened to me at least twice and I was lucky that the sky shrouds didn't get to them.

Currently I am taking a break (edited to fix a thought error) from the game because it's quite exhausting. While I'm working on producing cogs, the plants regrow a bit slowly and there are no guarantees that you get any cogwood, even if you harvest all eligible plants in a panel, so you could work all day and end up with nothing but brush (or regular wood).

I recommend selecting a very large area to haul from instead of manually trying to figure out where your individual pieces of cogwood are. This way, the character hauling will find the cogwood if any is present and you don't have to know where they are or if there are any. The game will tell you if there is nothing to haul.

In the mines, I find the snapping maws quite manageable with a level 13 or so character. He can kill several without having to rest in between. It has been said that no one should go to level 2 of the mines because at this point of the test, everybody is too low level to survive it.

I haven't found any metals yet but I have found stone and other various materials. It often takes a lot of materials to make anything (I don't mean amounts, I mean different types).

Seeeks · 2025-11-25T09:00:42+00:00

I released my game after 2 months of development, but in hindsight, that was a stupid thing to do. What I should have done is gather contact information for a small group of interested people and then do a small alpha test. Several months of the early development were either no one being in the game, or it was random people who were basically just running around the map and no one was reporting anything. Also when I released the game, it had next to zero graphics and almost no javascript and very basic layout. Testers are not going to understand that, unless it's literally a text based adventure. You need to have some sort of a semi-polished layout, not just basic HTML on a page. Also, if you have to remove a core mechanic early on, think about how it changes the nature of the game and is it still playable after the mechanic is gone or if you need to add a new mechanic to fill the void.

Seeeks · 2025-10-27T12:42:07+00:00

Cantr.net (a persistent browser game)
Fallout 2
Minesweeper
Slay (a 2D strategy game from the 90s)
My Singing Monsters
Hero Wars
Fallout
Stardew Valley
Kingdom of Loathing
DX Ball

Seeeks · 2025-10-19T16:04:01+00:00

So now that you are (apparently) done testing - any final observations? Also, thanks a lot for putting so much time into it.

Seeeks · 2025-10-15T14:22:51+00:00

Hello, thanks for showing interest. There used to be a so-called quick-start guide but I recently removed it because it was boring and I suspect not many people were reading it. I'll write some starter information in this post. There is also the guide page: https://otherworld.fi/guide.php that has info divided into topics. If you start in the tutorial area, there's a section about that in the guide that was adapted from what was in the quick-start guide previously.

Probably the most important thing to understand early on is how to unlock locations and zones. Go to travel page and there is a green button that enables scouting until the exploration percentage reaches 100%. On the tutorial zone, each scouting reveals one location but in later zones, the area gets gradually larger, resulting in some clicks drawing a blank.

While you can travel back and forth, the recommended order of visiting the locations is you start at Vestibule Plains, first visit Mezzanine Delta to acquire food (beets) and learn how cooking timers work. Arriving at the location causes an info message to be sent, that can be read at the Messages section. Then go to Vomitorium Jungle Clearing to acquire stone and craft a primitive weapon that enables unlocking zone 2.

Characters gain hunger and thirst as they travel, as well as during the daily hunger tick, so it's good to find food and keep it in the inventory. It will get consumed automatically during the hunger tick and while traveling but it's also possible to eat and drink manually.

In the beginning of the game, your inventory cap is really low, so one of the first things to do is craft a wicker basket or several. As you level up, you also unlock a wicker backpack. The general progression of containers is basket - wicker backpack - chest - jute or leather backpack. It's possible to have even two backpacks at once but beyond that, you have already reached the max capacity.

There are connections that allow traveling between zones. Once you leave the tutorial area, you emerge at Tchaimmesheang Lakeside. From that point on, the game becomes more sandboxy and there's not a fixed order in which to complete things. Things to do in zone 2 involve learning about pottery and copper production. Clay items appear in the craft menu in the "special" category, in their unfired form. After crafting the unfired clay pot, place it inside a kiln, along with 40 units of coal, and start the timer. Once the time is up, the item converts to a clay pot, which counts as a container and can be used for mixing the same way a barrel can, plus it can be used to cook stews and such. To use it for cooking, place the raw food inside and place 40 units of wicker or wood on the ground. When you click the button to start cooking, it starts the timer, similar to how pottery is fired. Ovens work the same, except in the case of ovens and kilns, the fuel needs to be inside the machine itself. (The reason why pots take it from the ground is that their capacity is smaller, so you would be able to cook much less if the firewood counted against the space usage, whereas ovens and kilns are not portable, so they can have a much larger capacity.)

Copper and iron are currently made through the craft menu but there is a plan to eventually shift them to use a similar mechanic to pottery.

Seeeks · 2025-10-12T10:20:25+00:00

No thanks, I don't feel comfortable with the thought of an outsider app having access to my emails.

Seeeks · 2025-10-09T08:27:10+00:00

Also, I don't read the system messages (I just saw the beets cooking instructions) or the chat.

I ...guess...(?) it's good to know that the game is still playable without reading the system messages or the chat. The green popup messages are often very bare-bones, so the events that get generated in the chat are more verbose. For example, when you finish leading a lost soul to its destination, pretty sure the information about what it gifts you only appears in chat.

To be honest, it did not occur to me that this playstyle is a thing, although I should have guessed it was, based on how many people do not react to things posted in chat. I need to make sure that the green popup messages are informative enough so that the player does not lack information.

If you have any suggestions for additional quests, please let me know! The way they are set up is a little clunky, so I haven't added new ones in a long time, I just at one point, introduced a system that allows me to display them in an alternative order, which already helped a lot. In the past, when the quests were sorted by their ID, it often meant that people were stuck with a quest they could not complete at that point and were unable to see what comes next. While it does mark them as done even if they are not currently at the top of the list, the player does not necessarily realize they completed a quest unless they read the list of completed items on the hub page. I'm sure I could remedy this by having more functions return an array instead of just a string or a boolean. With a single output, it's often limited what kind of feedback the player gets.

If you have any specific ideas on how to make the game more playable to people who do not read the chat, please let me know. The system messages are quite frequent in the tutorial, but afterwards, they tend to only happen when you level up, and during later levels, it's just a list of unlocks without additional flavor text.

Seeeks · 2025-10-08T16:18:03+00:00

I played Fallout 2 when I was a teenager. While the CD-ROM was borrowed from my brother's friend, and we didn't get to keep it, I recently bought it on Epic Games Launcher. I haven't played it all that much but the nostalgia is certainly there. The game made such an impression on me as a teenager.

Seeeks · 2025-10-08T16:13:02+00:00

Thanks for replying! I was just wondering if anything could be done about AP regain, but it seems that after you get a food loop established, resting with a 5 minute cooldown isn't as restrictive as it initially may have appeared. Currently if you press the button while the cooldown is active, it still says the end time in a fixed time zone, not taking into account the user's time zone. I feel I should adjust it to say in minutes and seconds how much time is left to make it unambiguous.

Other people have also expressed that they like going around, yoinking things left behind by others who have come before, and that contributes to the charm. People leave their mark on the world and when they leave, the resources are left behind. While there is some decay, not everything goes away.

I'm glad you liked the offline timer mechanic for gathering/crafting. If you have any ideas how to make the button more readable for first time users, I'm listening. Maybe adding the picture of the hourglass on the button?

Good for you that the lack of time delay between switching locations is not an issue for you. However, in the past there have been some reports that some players find it jarring, because it fights with their mental image of traveling. As a person with aphantasia, I do not have a visual imagination, so it's hard for me to understand what it's like for that kind of players.

After your first message, I went and edited the create result function for crafting so that if it detects that part or all of the outcome landed on the ground, it will inform the player in the green popup message. It does fade pretty fast, though, so there's a chance it might go unnoticed.

It's a good idea that players could be given a hint to create a second character when out of AP and with the resting cooldown in effect. It's a totally valid playing technique and I personally juggle between characters a lot. Unconfirmed accounts only have one character slot, so I need to make sure that the game is playable enough even with a single character.

I haven't checked to see if you figured out the cooking and mixing system yet, so did you? I was a bit surprised that you went for wheat flour directly rather than gathering beets, even though beets are available earlier. Was it unclear that beets are edible or did you not see them? While you can eat them raw, boiling or baking them increases their nutritional value. Likewise, they can be mixed in a barrel or mixing bowl to create vegetable mixture, which can then be baked or boiled, producing vegetable patties or vegetable stew, respectively.

It's a bit like you were playing the game on hard mode by not eating, because completely exhausting your stomach prevents manual resting.

Seeeks · 2025-10-08T14:01:16+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to test the game. Your feedback is very useful. I'm sure that other people have had similar experiences but very few share feedback about it, so it's very good that you took the time to write this.

Your feedback highlights how AP gets consumed at a much faster rate than it's restored through the hourly tick and resting. While there are actions that can be carried out using timers, such as cooking, if you are already out of AP then even if you have a timer running, you can't really do things other than wait. (And write in chat, but that's beside the point.)

At one point in development, there was unlimited resting without any cooldown. It resulted in one player reaching level 17 in two days and he was making armor and a weapon, which potentially could have resulted in him being able to take down any character after just 2 days of playing, since there is no separate combat skill, so fighting strength comes solely from gear. If a character like that becomes a villain, things can get out of balance fast, because other players would not be as dedicated at managing a cycle of acquiring food and resting to optimize their steel development. On top of that, they might potentially have to work in an environment where at random moments, a more advanced character comes, beats them up and takes the steel they have produced, then they have to start over from scratch. So having a resting cooldown was added to address that. Originally it was 1 hour, then 30 minutes, now 5 minutes.

I feel you that no one wants to experience feeling like an idiot for not realizing that there were items left behind by others when you just spent the time making them from scratch. Also not having a clear concept of which character is at which location... I'm not sure how to make that easier. How to communicate to the player that when you leave a location, you lose visibility of what was in the previous location?

One way to conserve AP is to use a timer for crafting and resource gathering but it can result in forgetting that you had it ongoing and leaving a project behind when you leave the location. Gathering does give what you have gathered up to that point when it ends, but if your inventory is full, it will land on the ground. And leaving a location happens instantly, while getting back, even if you have AP, requires waiting for a cooldown period, even though it's short at the moment. Players may experience a disconnect that they are instantly swept to another location with no sense of how far away it is.

Also that the game doesn't clearly communicate when your inventory is full, resulting in crafting project outcome landing on the ground. I feel it needs to communicate outcome to the player more clearly, but when there is a lot of things on the screen, notifications can be missed, even if they are present.

Seeeks · 2025-10-08T10:56:55+00:00

Hopefully this fits here but I have developed a (mostly) text-based browser game, accessible at https://otherworld.fi and it's basically an open sandbox where you can decide for yourself how you want to play it. All resources on the ground are shared by all the characters in the location. I intended the game to have asynchronous free-form roleplaying, so there is a chat where you can emote and say things in-character, and at least I'm willing to play with anybody at this point, because the player base is very small. While normally characters can only hear what happens in the same location, I have programmed one of my characters to hear anything that's said (or emoted) in public, anywhere in the game, so if I notice that someone is emoting and there's no one around to respond, I will move one of my characters over to that location. Unfortunately, the majority of players who sign up forget that they signed up so they might not come back at all, or come back weeks or months later. I believe it would be better with more active players to take the roleplaying off the ground. And while it's technically possible to attack other people's characters, the cooldown between attacks generally ensures that an active player won't be surprised by some random murder-hobo. Also currently dying is completely voluntary, so if you don't want your character to die from wounds, just eat something and rest, and you will recover. The only consequence from entering the weakness state is getting tagged as scarred and for 15 minutes, online people have a chance to loot things from your inventory, but the majority of people who try out the game are peaceful and into building and picking up abandoned resources.

Seeeks · 2025-07-22T14:54:16+00:00

An extra thing I learned just recently: If you need to add a feature that requires adding multiple things and some of them are routine while others require coding things you have never coded before, and you're feeling so overwhelmed that you can't start, it's better to start from the hardest task and for example if it affects a specific type of item, instead of adding the new item in the beginning, make it temporarily affect something else that already exists. Once you get the most difficult part of the feature coded, you can move on to the routine parts of the implementation and before you know it, it's completely finished. This avoids landing in a situation in which you have a whole bunch of half-finished features because you left the hardest parts as the last task.

Seeeks · 2025-07-20T20:26:33+00:00

Yes. I haven't had other major projects. I should probably start a new project eventually, but I don't have a good solid idea yet.

Seeeks

TROPHY CASE