Hello friends.

The first video footage taken from the satellite orbiting the planet Gliese has made it back to earth. As you can see, Gliese has been transformed from a lump of rock into a beautiful living planet. It has been seeded with plants and animals, and we even shipped out a few brave volunteers, who are standing around waiting for something to happen. Mysteriously, some things went wrong during the seeding process. There are a lot of bugs and gremlins that have crept in, and who is that guy at 2:30? We’ll have to catch up with him and ask him how he arrived on the planet. Most of these bugs will need to be cleaned up over the following weeks. There are also some important biomes missing, such as the mountains and the mines.

Roleplaying

I’ve been thinking about different ways to facilitate asynchronous text based roleplaying.

Conversation Trees

I think it would be nice for players to create ‘conversation trees’ for their characters, which they could use to tell anyone interested about their current activities. Hopefully this will spawn more interaction between people - rather than just standing around being too shy to know what to say to each other, you can get some ice-breakers out of the way and learn what goals each other is pursuing. I’m hoping this will be a good way for experienced players to on-board and engage new arrivals. It should be possible to set quests for each other, and provide a bit of flavour about who these mysterious standing sentinels are if you happen to spawn when nobody else is awake.

Players, Tables, Stages, and Towns

I would like to have different objects in the game act as different-sized ‘chat rooms’, to help players speak in private or in groups about things. In Cantr, it can be feel alienating if you are a new arrival in a large and busy town. Hopefully having these different communication channels will help people form more personal relationships. I believe if the most common form of communication moves away from being whole-town chats into smaller forms it may enable people to mantain multiple interesting interactions at once and form more intimate partnerships with their companions.

The smallest and most intimate size would be between two people, you can speak to each other in this fashion only when standing next to each other.

A table would be a chat room of limited size. You would have some ability to get up and sit down from the table whilst the conversation is ongoing, but if everyone gets up from the table at the same time the conversation history is lost.

A stage would be useable for one character to address many others at the same time. The character stood on the stage could give a passionate speech and the players in the audience could come and go as they please. If there is nobody stood on the stage the conversation history is lost.

Speaking in main towns would of course still be possible and probably the default way of communication when trying to organise a trade or a whole-town activity.

Trading

I think it would be useful to facilitate asynchronous trading. This will hopefully come in two forms - barter, and money. Barter trading will be possible through players marking what items they are holding are available for trade, and other players sending ‘trade offers’ which the first player can accept or reject. Players need to be stood next to each other at the time of acceptance to actually pass the goods between each other.

With money, trade can go even faster as you can set a price for your goods. I will try to come up with a way for multiple prices to be set, in case there are multiple currencies in circulation.

I think it would be nice for players to create shopfronts so they can trade goods they aren’t hauling around as well.

If you can dream up any interesting forms of chat room or interesting trading methods, feel free to suggest them in the discord. I would love to hear them!

Thanks for reading. Until next time!