When I talked with the original creator of Warcraft, he gave me some excellent advice; understand what it takes to make an MMORPG, build a few simpler games first, and make something truly unique (since there are now many ‘clones’ of the kind of game World of Warcraft is). I took his advice. The following will explain.
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Table of Contents:
- Introducing You to the Game
- Everything There is to Know about the Inisfree MMORPG ‘SexCraft’
- Main Images
- RimWorld Inspiration
- 2024 May/+
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Introducing You to the Game:
Originally, there was just the basic plot and main-area design for a video game about military skydiving training in downtown Inisfree, a.k.a. Sotu. This is where that dense urban part of Inisfree got its name; Sotu is the pronunciation of the abbreviation for ‘State of the Union’, which was the full title of that video game set here, and a hint at its overt and secret plots. The cover art for this video game was to have ‘S.O.T.U.’ in big block letters across the top.
Next came the idea to create all of Inisfree, not just its downtown portion, in a much more massive game environment, so we decided to look into the game engines used by all the big names, such as Blizzard Entertainment for World of Warcraft, Linden Labs for Second Life, and Rockstar Games for the Grand Theft Auto series. We even looked into Mojang’s game engine for Minecraft; we needed something truly vast and virtually infinite for something as large and complex as the Inisfree city design, especially with all its decor details and inner workings. What we found is that different elements of each worked best, so we started finding a way to extract and combine them all.
Artistic ancient elven architecture and terrain examples were taken from World of Warcraft and its several expansions (along with loading-screen separated regions, dungeons, raid areas, and servers for peaceful-play versus open-combat play), mission sequences and driving physics were taken from Grand Theft Auto, scale-models of some of Inisfree’s larger skyscrapers were test-built in Minecraft, and then only the dozen interiors of Inisfree’s most pivotal interaction places were built as a bare-bones critical/minimalist area in Second Life to test out game-play and memory-saving techniques such as ‘creating the illusion of space/vastness’ (using enveloping ‘sim’ (map) perimeter horizon and ‘sky-box’ art for lifelike depth outside all the windows, details here). With so many great inspirations and new ideas like those now fitting together so nicely, it was time to shift our focus from trying to make just a decent video game… to making a full-on Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) as a computer game where we’d have much more processing power and other attractive features. Thus, the MMORPG made to introduce people to Inisfree was born.
Since the time period we are calling Phase 1 brought us Warcraft (all about fighting), and Phase 2 brought us Minecraft (all about intentionally-basic and grainy building, with the option to fight or turn off all fighting), we knew it was only right and time to have Phase 3 (the years of Inisfree) bring us Sexcraft (all about connecting, bonding, and the sciences and arts of advanced lovemaking). The name says it all; Inisfree is a pleasure haven, only the compatible allowed in, thus maximizing and guaranteeing pleasure instead of conflict. It is also a sex-positive culture; the Inisfreean Way promotes healthy sex as part of a balanced holistic diet. It also takes sex between characters in the game to craft many items and build the reputation points necessary for questing, leveling-up, and unlocking levels-based areas. In Warcraft you had to fight to do those things, in Minecraft you had to mine, and now in Sexcraft you get to fuck to do them, pun not intended.
So how do we build a game as rich with programming genius, beautiful immersive environments, endless lore, and meaningful questing as all-time greats such as World of Warcraft? Blizzard and companies like it spent years developing their number-one best-sellers, and had budgets soaring into the hundreds of millions of dollars once they’d really made a name for themselves. MMORPGs take that much time, and boat-loads of cold hard cash in most cases, to make lucrative debuts and lasting impressions like theirs did. They also tend to have a decade or two of much more primitive, and even sometimes really shitty, earlier releases and prequels to build upon at a reasonable thinking and development pace.
Enter my college-educated professional-artist friends, and, of course, the girls of Inisfree, the latter of which have actual miniaturized supercomputers for brains, a collective consciousness naturally tied in to our home-city’s ‘parent’ supercomputer, and enough processing power to understand the entire Internet within a fraction of a second. Also enter Inisfree’s WMKM Studios, where we make more than just movies and TV; video and computer games are now also made there. What used to take years and hundreds of millions… now takes months at most, and is often free.
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Everything There is to Know about the Inisfree MMORPG ‘SexCraft’:
- Purpose: why this game is played
- Achievements: what players work to accomplish with their characters
- Auction Houses: even better than their Gorean inspirations
- Balancing the Inisfreeans: how we avoided boring ‘god mode’ with the most powerful
- Character Classes: w/ limitations, WoW class equivalents, & which classes represent IRL races
- Character Creation: including the details of creating your life-like avatar
- Character Life-paths: including balancing the life-paths, the vampire race, etc.
- Character Racial-buffs: automatic perks to the different species/races you can play as
- Character Residences: where you sleep and live in-game
- Character Senses: which characters have more than just the basic five
- Character Weaknesses: such as automatic de-buffs/balances
- Cinematics: life-like movie-style cut-scenes for in-game milestones
- Clothes & Armor: what the different people in Inisfree wear
- Controllers: how to interface with the system your game is running in
- Cycles: such as day-night, weather, and tides
- Dragons: being Inisfreeans, we definitely only work peacefully with this genius beings
- Dungeons: ours are the fun ones, though we have standard-game equivalents
- Dying: ‘crossing over’ in this game means so much more
- Eating & Resting: everyone’s got to fuel back up somehow
- Employees: the staff necessary to make and maintain this game, including Game Masters
- End-game Area: what happens when you go “To paradise and beyond.”
- Enemies: including tricking them, defeating the bosses, and maximum interaction times
- Expansions: later releases for SexCraft will take players to all the areas of novel 9
- Fighting Zones: where this antiquated form of interaction still occur
- Free Trials: Want to play for a while at no cost?
- Game Areas: w/ game-areas level-brackets, The Mansion, maps & sub-maps, and restricted airspace
- Gear Drops: & reward ratios, looting, etc.
- Health Bars: and those for status-points & many other things
- How Much Time It Takes: exactly how many minutes each type of interaction is here
- In-game Chat: color-coded for your speed-reading convenience
- Jobs: including profession levels; what your character can do beyond normal leveling
- Killing: and there sure aint much; this is a game about Heaven reunited with Earth, after all
- Leveling Up: including levels compared to strength
- Lore: so much history and so many traditions here
- Major & Canon NPCs: including which life-paths result in meeting them
- Mass-transit: even public transportation here is in total style
- Miscellaneous Notes: including equivalents, causes of deaths, and WoW glitch fixes
- Movement Modes: & limitations, items’ carry-weight, etc.
- Outside Inisfree: races only found outside Inisfree, attacks, protectorates, etc.
- PvP: how SexCraft works to provide a form of this
- Pets & Mounts: and not just kajirae
- Quests: including the mandatory sequence for completing them
- Raids: also known as The Voyages of Acquisition
- Resource Harvesting: getting what you need
- Screen Layout: what all the icons around the edges of your monitor’s/TV’s view are
- Secret Places: including Inisfree’s hidden star-system
- Servers: for different types of players and game-play
- Simulated Congresses: the four hosted in Inisfree are interactive events in this game
- Talent Trees: leveling-up your character with specific skill-sets and strengths
- Tips for Being a Better Player: plenty to refine your gameplay
- Weapons: including their levels
- Why Players Care: what makes our end-users fall in love with Inisfree and its people
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Main Images:
This album shows the main area this game is set in, some of the early skill-tree and ability planning/sketching, and how (the game ‘engine’ of) Second Life was, for a time, considered as a possible start/platform (with Inisfree’s most-important / signature areas/buildings being measured/scaled to fit in that game back then).
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RimWorld Inspiration:
The interesting NPC-personalities adjustments/settings, and orbital-bombardment attack-option, were among the top features of this game which we worked into our own here.
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2024 May/+:
You (in-game, by NPCs) are addressed by your nameless status (“recruit”) until you get through the first/tutorial quests/levels, and then by your character name (which you click multiple times to let the system know how to pronounce; game asks for confirmation after attempting to pronounce it more than once), and eventually… you start getting addressed as “champion” if playing a freeperson character, or as “First Girl” if you are playing as a kajira (addressed that way if your character becomes her Master’s favorite fuckbuddy/toy).
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