Yostan, second attempt

[Charles]

Before Magic of the Gods, there was Yostan, our first attempt at an MMORPG (other than the Sheep Island mini-game which is now part of Magic of the Gods).

Virtually all the work done for Yostan is now obsolete because we new too little about making MMORPGs and didn't do it very well. With the experience gained from that, I came up with the idea for Magic of the Gods and proceeded to create that.

Now, with the even greater experience from Magic of the Gods, I find that it would be very easy to go back and do Yostan. The original game concept was quite simple. The problem was that I tried to do an overly large and complex map that wasn't needed and the map creation software had bugs in it.

I could do that same map today in a few hours at most using a much more efficient technique and the bugs in the software are allegedly gone.

If anyone reading this is interested, look at what's written about Yostan on the Nations and Empires forum (linked to below) and tell me if this is a game you would want to try out.

Ignore the stuff about Yostan as a text-based game. That was something we did to test out some game concepts. I'm talking about the full 3-D graphics MMORPG of Yostan. Yostan was intended to be just the first, very simplistic module of an effort to transform the world of Nations and Empires (TM) from a text based game to an MMORPG with full 3-D graphics.

The first message or two on this thread give you the basic scenario of Yostan. Ignore the rest, this is the text-based role playing thread:

www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=overseas&action=display&thread=71&page=1

There's also a short story written about this scenario. You can find it here:

nationsandempires6.blogspot.com/2007/08/last-village.html

That's part of the main Nations and Empires website, by the way. If it's not online anymore when you read this, another copy of the same story is here:

www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=22

We were experimenting with pre-generated characters and an new way of charging for games. Instead of a monthly subscription fee, we would auction off pre-generated characters. You could play for free and start with a lowly character and build them up or you could buy or earn a much better starting character. Either way, you could play for free as long as your character was alive. Due to the emphasis on realism, characters who died were not to return to life. You'd have to get a new character to keep playing.

Here's the auction thread and list of some of the pre-generated characters:

www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=25

In case you are interested in the Nations and Empires game that Yostan is just a small part of you can read about it on the Nations and Empires website or go to the forum where people are currently playing the text based version.

The website is here:

www.nationsandempires1.blogspot.com

The forum is here:

www.naegame.proboards83.com/index.cgi

[Charles]

Here's a new twist on this. In the September 2, 2008 session of Magic of the Gods, Beepe was able to actually walk around in Yostan. Until now, nobody but me has been able to do that for more than a few seconds. Due to technical problems, people going there just ended up getting disconnected.

This was the main problem that resulted in the Yostan game being put on hold and Magic of the Gods being created instead. I'm not going to switch my focus back to Yostan now that Magic of the Gods has come so far, but there is the possibility of doing both.

The reason she was able to do this is probably related to efforts I made recently to fix the problem.