Of Gods and Mortals

Slightly off-topic but does Kayssplace have a menu button sized logo that's useable for advertisement on external websites.

I'm asking this because I'm currently in the process of adding a new website for OGaM and I would like to add a "Kayssplace" link in picture form as a button redirect to here.

It's not currently available yet on the internet but when it does, you can check it out at www.ofgodsandmortals.com.au.  :)
 
Honestly, I haven't a clue :( .

My advice would be to scrounge around the site for something close and resize to your needs :) .
 
Next Update - May 27th 2014

Story Update:

Decided to take a little time off scripting to start to work on the story as a whole. The idea behind the goddess for the original story was ok, but it could be better written. If anyone has some additional suggestions, it would be appreciated but for the moment, here's the gist of it.

Potential Spoilers ahead but Im sure most people have played the games.  :)

Black and White, Black and White 2 and Battle of the Gods all had their own story arc for what they were originally designed for. Black and White 1 was your entry into the land of eden and your goal to retrieve 3 the creed hearts in order to defeat nemesis and take absolute control over the world. Black and White 2 was a little quirky in its story with the whole RTS thing in there and someone's idea of coming back to eden because the Aztecs wanted to dominate. Battle of the Gods presented a little better story bringing the undead aztec god into play who was created purely to spite the player and the greek nation.

In OGaM, I want to cover a few things for the story:

  • First - Backstory - The idea that ruling over the greek nation not only inspired the aztecs to have a god in their life but the others as well. In order for this back story to work, however, close attention will be made to Black and White 2's story where the Japanese and Norse joined the Greeks to stop the Aztecs. A very early design thought about this was to introduce new islands that were previously hidden away during the conflict between the Aztec god and the player in Battle of the Gods.
  • Second - Building On From Backstory - The premise behind OGaM's story is to have it play out similar to black and white 1 where new gods have appeared across eden as a result of the aztec god's presence. But not all is well between these deities. As the longest standing deity in Eden, you are charged with liberating or eliminating any of those would threaten the greek "way of life". Whilst this is happening however, something within the greek nation causes unrest and may challenge your followers devotion to you. As the mightiest power in the land now, an enemy deity would find your nation as a suitable seat of power, but the question is, which god would be up to the challenge?
  • Third - Story-driven Quests - With the introduction of scaffolding to Black and White 2: Of Gods and Mortals, the toolbar will no longer be a pest to players. While taking on the role of the greek god once more, you will find your people have rediscovered the ability to create scaffolds again. With this knowledge, you are able to interact with many of them through the main storyline to unlock new buildings the way the tribute menu used to be the "go-to" for purchasing new buildings. Doing story quests will allow the toolbar to be completely disabled and bring back the hand to world interaction BnW2 sorely needed.
  • Lastly - Story-driven landscapes - Gone will be the "build-all and win" easy mode of impressiveness as well as the war mechanic of the game. In it's place, will be gold story quests within each land that require more than just take X, Y and Z town and win. Story-Driven quests in these worlds, can also generate belief towards a town. For example: On one land, the current god (if any) may be driving the people to starvation, giving them food may generate a boost to belief which can push towards taking the town from that god.

On topic of scaffolds from story point of view. Since impressiveness will no longer be a thing, there is a chance I can cut back on the number of buildings available to discover and build but that might not be the best idea. Present your opinions.

If you enjoyed this early look, please let me know and contribute if you want to. Again, this is an idea toss around but I will strive to make a lot of this a real thing. Thanks guys for the support.  :)
 
This all sounds fantastic! I'm particularly looking forward to the belief mechanic, if it's well executed. It should breathe a lot of strategy back into the game, and replace the laborious process of building dozens and dozens of houses to win.

A point on the story though - why are new gods appearing due to the Aztec god's presence? Could it be perhaps that the chaos caused by the Aztec god has caused fractures in the societies of the Greeks, Japanese and Norse which has forced them against each other, and caused them to pray for gods of their own? I know this would be changing the story a bit, but as the elder god (and the only one from BW1 times) wouldn't it be cool if your task were to throw off the authority of the younger gods and restore harmony between the warring races? That way, the player wouldn't be the same old god of the Greeks that we see in BW2, but could have control over all the races they impress/destroy. I'm envisioning a land where you can take over/liberate towns of all kinds of races. If you recall land 2 of BW1, where Lethys had his core territory of Celtic towns but there were also groupings of other races like the Greek area and the Indian area. It would certainly shake things up a bit and I imagine you could fairly easily extend the scaffolding system to towns of other races. It's just an idea of course, I like the premise of your story!

I think the complicated mechanics of BW2 like starvation and a need for sleep, entertainment etc would really work well with the belief system and make it delightfully complex. Wars between gods, if they were based on how these gods treat their people, would get quite political! Impressing another town would be kind of like spreading divine propaganda! :D (I'm getting carried away)
 
SkelApe said:
A point on the story though - why are new gods appearing due to the Aztec god's presence? Could it be perhaps that the chaos caused by the Aztec god has caused fractures in the societies of the Greeks, Japanese and Norse which has forced them against each other, and caused them to pray for gods of their own?
Click to expand...

That's a good alternative. The understanding could be that allowing the Aztecs to bring their own god into existence can question how much the japanese and norse people truly believe in the player; if simply having their own deity could've pushed the mortal war in a different direction. Working off "The Prophecy" in Black and White 2:

A tribe will face extinction at the hands of the mightiest power in the world, but will survive, rebuild and, with the strongest and wisest of all Creatures, strike back at those who nearly destroyed them. This tribe will come to dominate the globe.

And, in a godless world, they will be led by a god...
Click to expand...

The divine conflict in both Black and White 2 and Battle of the Gods are the result of a world-wide dissolution between the 3 civilizations of Eden left. Seems to make sense.

SkelApe said:
and I imagine you could fairly easily extend the scaffolding system to towns of other races.
Click to expand...

yes, that could be possible since the enums I'm working off to create the greek buildings also have access to the norse, japanese and aztec versions.  :)
 
Daxter said:
On topic of scaffolds from story point of view. Since impressiveness will no longer be a thing, there is a chance I can cut back on the number of buildings available to discover and build but that might not be the best idea. Present your opinions.
Click to expand...
Personally, I enjoyed having all those building options.  Although I can understand the headache it gives you incorporating them all into the scaffold system.

Long after I was done competitively playing against the AI on a land, I enjoyed building up my little corner of paradise.  So having all the bits and bobs from B&W2 still there would be appreciated.

In fairness to Lionhead & PM, this was one of the few things they got right on B&W2.  Although the benefit of building to win was waaaay too easy and I agree should be removed.  However, with the "build-to-win" mechanic gone, I'm just wondering if all these extra things could have some other kind of functional contribution to gameplay other than being pretty :p ?
 
That's an interesting point, Pat. Perhaps the amount of impressive buildings one has could act as a kind of multiplier of one's impressiveness? (e.g. your city has lots of bath-houses, so benevolent miracles are slightly more impressive?) I imagine the day to day needs of one's civilians would still need to be cared for (e.g. graveyards, old people's homes) as well as the necessities like altars, creature pens and storehouses, which only really leaves the impressive buildings without a definitive function.
 
If you think about it, buildings also affect your influence ring, it's a possibility to add functionality to the more impressive buildings to grow your influence ring decrementing in amount given the more they're built. Or maybe growing your town's impressiveness level can have an effect on various things.

e.g. Having graveyards in your town can unlock the "Life" miracle, or perhaps universities can be used to discover new buildings (an alternate to story quests).

Seems to get deeply complicated the more you think about it. I do believe, the impressiveness mechanic in the vanilla BnW 2 game allowed Lionhead to expand the number of buildings because they all gave a certain amount of impressiveness to a town, essentially the city builder aspect. However on the other hand, the townspeople are able to think for themselves for what they desire the most. Placing random buildings to increase the impressiveness of your town then was simply mechanical to BnW2's gameplay, when you take away that gameplay, there's no need to worry about how some of these buildings work because they don't do anything.
 
Daxter said:
Seems to get deeply complicated the more you think about it. I do believe, the impressiveness mechanic in the vanilla BnW 2 game allowed Lionhead to expand the number of buildings because they all gave a certain amount of impressiveness to a town, essentially the city builder aspect. However on the other hand, the townspeople are able to think for themselves for what they desire the most. Placing random buildings to increase the impressiveness of your town then was simply mechanical to BnW2's gameplay, when you take away that gameplay, there's no need to worry about how some of these buildings work because they don't do anything.
Click to expand...

True, perhaps SkelApe's idea isn't so bad though.  If memory serves, population was the equivalent in B&W1.  In that, the more population/believers you had, the more powerful you could become and take over other towns.

In B&W2, population became less important in lieu of buildings.  That in turn increased your impressiveness rather than your power.

How's this for a simplification:
  • Villagers express a building need - civic, military, impressive (?)
  • You meet that need as you see fit from the list of buildings available.
  • Villagers bet bored if you build the same thing repeatedly (meaning it's more difficult to satisfy their needs that way).  So you're encouraged to mix things up.

I'm not saying that'd be a doddle to implement, but it's just an idea.
 
Slightly off topic, but will this mod affect or alter the file "white.exe" or "battleofthegods.exe"?
 
No it won't.

Also while I'm here...

Back on topic. So, theoretically, if impressiveness is kept in OGaM, rather than the "build-to-win" mechanic it can be used as divine support in conquering other towns as your influence grows towards them. Tie it into the belief mechanic, so that when you do go to take over other towns throughly "godly" means, the impressiveness of your city can affect how easy or hard it is to impress the enemy.

As for Town Scaffolds, I've finally got the bugger to work, but at the moment, the only thing you can do with town centre scaffolds is make them extensions of your main base and any influence gained as a result of this "New Town", will be joined with the original town. I do want to make it possible to have it not attach itself to the player's original town but it could be a good idea to not do that and just restrict how far the player can create the new town to prevent them simply dropping a town centre scaffold right next to the enemy capital (also visually, it would create a deformed influence line between the new town and the main base).

After I release the video update for this, it might be a good idea to record and upload new feature videos for both the God AI (currently v2.0) which currently has an outdated version, and the scaffold system (a short but in-depth video "show and tell" of the ability to create an entire town from scratch with scaffolds  :D).
 
All this sounds fantastic - good job! I'd love to see the new town centres in action.
 
I found a glitch with one of my scaffolds :rolleyes  :upside

GlitchyAltarScaffold_zps990fc883.png


If the altar is gonna do that to me, well, that could be a problem. >_>
 
Daxter said:
.....
If the altar is gonna do that to me, well, that could be a problem. >_>
Click to expand...

Looks to me like the sacrifice flame and miracles are actually separate models from the alter.

Maybe you could fuse the separate models to the alter somehow...
 
I know it sounds a bit... un-neat, but would it be possible to have a separate flag for the altar that puts the blueprint in the hand as opposed to the scaffold? It looks like this is the only building that cannot be created in the script.
 
I might have to just take it off the list altogether, since you can still pick the most desired building from off the town centre. When starting a new toon, it assumed an altar would be on the list so I can just exclude it from the list of scaffolds.  :)

SkelApe said:
I know it sounds a bit... un-neat, but would it be possible to have a separate flag for the altar that puts the blueprint in the hand as opposed to the scaffold? It looks like this is the only building that cannot be created in the script.
Click to expand...

That's unfortunately not possible through script. Building blueprints are hard-coded into the game, this is why I had to use model switching.
 
Daxter said:
I might have to just take it off the list altogether, since you can still pick the most desired building from off the town centre. When starting a new toon, it assumed an altar would be on the list so I can just exclude it from the list of scaffolds.  :)
Click to expand...

Maybe then rather than disabling the construction menu you should keep it there so people can choose to build an alter when they want to.

You could also pre-build the alters so that they are already built when people start the level. Like how the Creature Pen is pre-built on the first two Norse levels.
 
The construction menu defeats the purpose of scaffolding. Usually when starting a land, the highest desired buildings would be Storehouse, field, altar and temple so I'm not too worried about it being a scaffold.

Thanks though.  :)
 
Video should be out soonish, I'm moved on from Windows Movie Maker to After Effects so I'm trying out new stuff.  :)
 
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