Astral Realms

Phoenix Game Development

JackStone@phoenixgamedevelopment.com

December 2012

Concept

Astral Realms is a vast, open world exploration and social game. Players can explore, interact, and create their own dynamic, living world. The game features many randomly generated “Realms”, each with distinct visual styles, characteristics, and even physics and interaction options. Gameplay ranges from flooded ocean worlds where players can only communicate by sending messages in bottles, to arid wastelands, lush forests, frozen tundras, and everything in between where players have to search for miles to find any signs of civilisation.

Key Features

• Unparalled diversity and scope, realms are huge, and totally unique, it could take hours to explore just one!

• The world is a blank slate, evolving according to the actions of the players within it. Players are free to make their mark and develop the world as they wish, either alone, or in collaboration with other players.

• Ability to run on a huge variety of devices.

• Appeal to a large audience, players can create their own “Avatar” and write their own dynamic story.

• Simple, intuitive gameplay

• Players must search the world for other users to interact with, dispensing with the “Information overload” common to many social games.

• Ability to transform the world by creating buildings, cutting down trees, diverting rivers, etc.

• Groups of players who find each other can combine forces, creating towns, villages, and eventually larger structures, as they attract more players.

Player Motivation

The primary motivation for players is to explore the huge, dynamically generated worlds, or “realms” and interact using a variety of tools, from leaving behind simple messages for other players, to creating buildings and landscaping. In time, groups of players will create entire cites, and landmarks in their names, creating a fully functioning society, while still searching the realms for new places and new people.

Genre

Astral realms incorporates elements from Social Worlds, Role playing games and open world sandbox type games. It also features elements of storytelling, as players are encouraged to write their own stories for their Avatar.

Gameplay Overview

Due to the large number of possible clients, all interacting with a single server, the interface will change from client to client. There are several distinct types of client:

• Graphical clients are “conventional” computer games, they must be targeted at a particular platfrom (Windows, Mac, etc) then downloaded and installed. Gameplay is through a first person interface, with on-screen menus.

• Telnet clients use any existing telnet software, including the standard Microsoft windows based telnet client. They require no additional libraries, downloads, or setup procedures, simply open your favourite telnet client and open a connection to the game server. Gameplay is through a command-line interface.

• Web-based clients are designed to work with any standard web browser. They feature less sophisticated visuals than the Graphical clients, but require no downloading, and should be compatible with more devices.

• Smartphone/Tablet PC clients are designed to function within the limitations of the mobile platform, and feature simple, but fully 3d graphical worlds.

Target Audience

This project is designed to appeal to an eclectic mix of users, from social networking afficionados to RPG gamers, to fans of the old Text-Based MUD's, and possibly even budding authors who want to try their hand at writing a different type of story.

Astral Realms is, at heart, a simple idea, giving it great scope to draw in players from a wide range of genres and demographics.

Target Hardware

In order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, the game is built around a “single server/ multiple clients” architecture, using a custom socket-based networking interface. Clients can be written for any platform, in any language, using either Text-based or graphical engines. This means that any device capable of accesing the internet can play Astral Realms. This includes Windows, Linux, and Mac PC's smartphones tablets, Telnet clients, Web Browsers, old and obsolete machines etc. It is also possible for users to write their own clients, all that is needed is to parse the commands from the server and implement them on the client.