Create a special Land Tile to place in the player’s Farm Area that houses immersive representations of all the game’s features. Expansion potential includes a customizable ‘town center’ building, nameable towns, and social/community connections.
The goals of this feature align with what we are trying to do, and we appreciate the thought and work put into this! We definitely need an in game lobby, and improvements on our early game experience. Internally, we have discussed ideas along these lines and I agree that a feature like this would benefit players both current and new. As we’re building out new game modes and core loops, it is inevitable that we’ll need a hub/lobby/worldmap/towncenter type experience to allow players to quickly access different areas of the game and make a smoother onboarding experience.
For Jousting release, we are currently discussing what players will first see if they have only unicorns. The idea that we are thinking for V1 is an image/popup that overlays the cloud background if a player has no lands placed. This image would point players to Inventory to lock in Unicorns/Land, and to Jousting if they have Unicorns, and other useful information about the game. We also plan to add more links/access points to the frame around the game build to make it much easier for player to find the different website/community elements of the game.
Another thing we are planning on doing for jousting, is to have the game ‘remember’ which game mode you are in and load up directly into that on return (so if you left the game in Jousting, you would load into the Jousting lobby). This would allow for players who only have unicorns and/or want to focus on Jousting to bypass the farm on load. (Getting feedback from you all on this idea would be great!)
Back to the proposal, we would like to add a game lobby space to our game! We have some thoughts about the implementation though… instead of building it into the Farm Scene, we would want to build a scene that players would load into before entering any of the game loops (a world map/game lobby). This scene would have different in-world buttons for each of the game modes (Joust, Farms, Tribes, Racing, etc) and the in-world buttons that take players to the different UI screens like suggested in the proposal. This would be technically easier and fits the architecture we’ve created with jousting. Each game loop will be its own ‘scene’ so having a step before that to move people around and make sure we’re being smart about downloading game assets will be valuable as we grow into a larger and larger game.
If we went this route, it does mean having a free to play mini land/farm plot path wouldn’t work with this specific feature. I do think though that there will be players who aren’t as interested in the farming game loops and want to focus on jousting or racing for example, in which case tying our tutorials to the farm loop might not make sense.
If we moved forward with the proposal as is, it would be very large effort for Art, Engineering, and Design. It would also have long-term scalability impact as not all new players will have land, nor necessarily will want to buy land and would require us to always have the farming scene as the primary starting location. Putting it in the farm scene would require us to create a specific-sized asset to house all of these buildings and over time would likely need rebuilding/refactoring in order to support future features.
Recommendation
We like the goals of the proposal and it aligns with some of the ideas we have! We’d like to hear any feedback to see if this implementation idea would align with the community goals.