I guess it depends on the developer and what they want exactly. In games like Ultima Online (which is free till like October 16th) and Mine Craft where the tools allow the players customization over what they create in detail you get a lot more ugly and weird buildings then you do clever or beautiful ones.

Before anyone says "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" if you walk around in either UO or check a few servers in Mine Craft you'll either agree or need to get your eyes checked =P

A way I've been trying to design a house/building system for a game has been to separate the private homes of players and public buildings of guilds/factions/governments. With trade routes it depends a lot on the game so it’s hard to design a specific system but I hope to go with giving players the options to transport goods in their own way with in game adventures.

I had an idea that you could build a location, and you could attach it to the world at certain spots to control resources, it wasn't required but certain locations unlocked more content and resoruces..once a location was placed it could be attacked by players and you use npc's to defend it.

More as a strategy based rpg, ff tactics, etc (you control 8-10 units on a grid map)

A Tale In The Desert lets you build your own house. You even have to make the bricks/wood too.

There's no fighting though.

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Original post by Stardog A Tale In The Desert lets you build your own house. You even have to make the bricks/wood too. There's no fighting though.

Bizarrely, house building was made less customizable in the latest version of that game, reducing the wall style choices from 3 to only 1. Paint was prohibitively expensive and tended to look bad (washed-out) in the previous version and probably still is like that unless they removed paint from the game entirely.

Personally, I love building houses but I want the interface for building them to be at least as customizable as that in sims 2 (or a 2D equivalent would be fine in a 2D game). Color is especially important - in a 3D or vector MMO there just is no excuse any more for not having every item a player would purchase for looks available in a full range of standard colors. This goes equally well for houses, mounts, clothing, tattoos, hair, skin, eye, and any other physical accessories characters might have (horns, wings, tails, patterns of stripes or spots).


As for trade routes, that really should be a guild or global marketplace function, not one in the physical world because it wouldn't work well due to player turnover and differing online times. What would be nice is being able to see profession levels for all guild members (if the game has profession levels) and the ability to place orders/bounties in the marketplace, like the gold trading market in PWI or the trade system in NeoPets. In PWI you can deposit some number of coins in the marketplace, and it will automatically buy for you the first X number of gold which are being sold at or below the price you specify. In NeoPets you can put up an item as a trade, add a note about what you want to swap for it, and other players make you various offers if items and/or money. Gaia Online has a similar system but it's much less useful because you can only offer trades to a specific person, you can't create one and let anyone who wants to bid on it, or browse trade lots created by others.

In terms of the idea of being attacked while offline, what about the idea of player buildings serving such a function that the town (either in the form of players or bot guards) naturally protects them? You would expect in a walled town, for instance, that the town guard would protect your merchant shop and the disincentives for burning it down would be the loss of the shop. But you could create all sorts of gameplay out of this if you have factions, insurance, guards with patrol routes, etc.

I am supprised to not see SWG mentioned here under this topic. Player built structures, even towns, being very popular during the height of SWGs run. (Yes I am one of the many that left due to NGE) The concept was well thought out. Personal housing that allowed you to show off trophies, utility type buildings for memebers of the city as well as passers by, and ultimatly the ability to add factional buildings (outposts, research stations, etc) that players of the opposing faction attepted to raid on a regular basis to earn faction points (standing). I have barely scratched the surface of all of the features they implimented with SWG, so you may want to delve further if what I have mentioned catches your interest.

I am also working on implimenting a system of player/guild created towns and structures into the game I am developing. I would go into more details, but am trying to keep certain aspects of the game design out of the public eye for the time being.

The whole point of the MMO Shadowbane was building cities and seizing others. Also Darkfall currently implements this.

Look at ATITD too.

Consider that houses can go down as well as up. Along time ago (in a gameworld far far away) I saw what a mess UO turned into when they allowed the huge 'houses' to clutter their world map and thought that with a little imagination (and money from the moronic management who botched that game bigtime by skimping of rework money) you could have small houses which then had basements as large and deep as you wanted -- WITHOUT utterly destroying the scenic surface of the World. Hobitt holes would have been a nice option/solution.

Another way to get the houses the players wanted would have been houses out over the water. Imagine houses on pilings interconnected by bridged walkways sticking far into the mostly unused water surface (the world map being 1/3+ ocean). They already had assets which could have been used with little modififcation.

Their block sysyetm for building houses was neat, but there was still the surface clutter problem.


Games like Lord Of The Rings Online have gotten past the house space/clutter limitation by having housing areas in bubble zones which can be expanded infinitely (by replication), but their houses are largely useless (except for a little extra storage shared by an account characters and a recall/jump point and as a place to put trophies (unfortunately with 1/3 as many lockdowns/hardpoints as their ought to be).

This is kind of a tangential thought, but instead of PvE or PvP, has any game attempted Players vs Dungeon Master? Sure, lots of games have one-off GM events especially on the cusp of a patch, but nothing terribly interactive. I'm talking about the GMs acting like permanent D&D-style DMs, a few generals controlling AI armies. Like any good DM, they wouldn't be cheating or trying to "beat" the players, just making the game more fun.

Ditch PvP. Make the game an epic cooperative struggle against a universal enemy. Many issues of balance could be remediated with a gentle thumb on the scale, rather than strict rules. Too many little houses cluttering up the landscape? Have a slowly increasing wave of monsters invade the area, forcing players to band together in cities for self-defense. Everything built by players should also be destructible, but not by other players.

I could go off much further on this tangent, but I'll save it for another topic.