Month: August 2018

It’s What We’ve Always Talked About …

For as long as anyone can remember we’ve always had big ideas in the Republic and most of the core group will share stories of our grand plans whether it was to open our own game store or design our own video games. Well, we’ve knocked a few of them out of the park including our own game store and here we are at the brink of designing our own games, not just video games, but all kinds of games including tabletop and our own RPG ruleset. Over the last few weeks we’ve started putting many of those plans into action above and beyond the game store.

SSR has always been about building something rather than destroying it and that attracts gamers who are more about positivity than the toxicity that dominates some communities. We’ve toppled our share of enemies in the PvP games we’ve played, but we always do it within the mechanics and confines of the game even when our adversaries decide to engage us in the meta realm stealing game accounts and attempting to hack our website and forums. Despite all of that we’ve always come out on top as a well respected community. Why do I bring that up? Because it’s how we’re building our businesses and design teams that are an extension of the community we have created.

Let’s Make Game Design Fun and About You

We’re all gamers in one form or another. We’re also storytellers and you have a story to tell. Some of the greatest stories come from the least expected places and talk about the rise of nobodies to become somebodies. The mantra among the leadership in SSR is to talk about how we don’t just recruit leaders, but we build them. We are often times victims of our own success. In some of the MMOs we’ve played we tend to lose members in groups because we’ve empowered them to become leaders. We teach organization, coordination, discipline and leadership. We help people rise up and better themselves. It seems silly in a video game community; we see games as a platform to not only escape from reality for a bit of time, but to return to it being better equipped and able to handle whatever comes our way.

This same philosophy applies to the games we want to build and the stories we want to tell. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies though, because we follow the Conan the Barbarian attitude. Life isn’t black and white, it’s shades of grey (no, not that kind … there’s way more than 50 of them by the way…). Good people do bad things and vice versa. “Bad” people seek redemption and good people mess up, but in the end we can all seek to better ourselves no matter the conditions in which we find ourselves.

That’s why we want to hear from you and learn about your stories. It can be something personal or something about a character you have in the SSR. We’re crowdsourcing our game development from the top to the bottom. Our game world includes all of our players from those who have done great things to those who have attempted to screw us (and we’ve got some great ones that are better than your typical, shallow, worn out, hollywood plotline).

That Sounds Cool, But How Exactly?

If you’re a member of SSR you’re already part of the master plan. Your participation in the guild have already secured your place in our history. Even those we’ve had to part ways with will have a role in some way. Too easy, right? Well, there’s a whole lot more aside from that in case you want to get even more involved. Okay, so how do you do that? Keep playing! We’re rolling out custom servers for various games to help capture even more detailed stories and letting you build out our world.

Wurm Unlimited: Our Detailed Game World

We’re pulling from a ton of different sources for our game world’s history and some of them are long or recently passed (Darkfall Online, Age of Conan, Wurm Online, Conan Exiles, Life is Feudal and more!). The most recent examples include Wurm Unlimited. The game is so unique in the fact that we can build a per pixel custom height map then import it into a world generation tool to create an exact replica of our own world. By playing Wurm Unlimited on our server you’re able to create cities, homesteads, strongholds, camps and other Points of Interest that we can include in our final game world. Not only can we get a feel for a 3D representation of our world, we can start messing with some of the geopolitical implications.

We’re starting with a colony of the Republic in a distant continent that will form the ancient past and play into the current era of the nation. The map is what we’ll include in our final game world design. Any of the Points of interest you’re building by claiming and building up deeds right now will be included in future games and lore events. You can see the Live Map of the server below to get a sense of the ongoing building already taking place. Hop on our Discord server and get involved.

As of right now we’re on the colonial continent of SSR, but we’re working on the home continent to create a custom height map based on our ongoing game world map. Soon ™, you’ll be able to sail in game using ships you construct in the game to head over to the main continent that will be partially built up from SSR lore. It will include NPCs that reflect prominent SSR members (so you may just encounter yourself in your Ministerial or Officer position) and the rank and file across our various past games (We love you guys!).

Longterm Plan

This map will drive all of our future projects from mobile games to an MMO, novels, short stories and who knows. We want you to help us build an intricate world from the ground up that we can use to create an immersive environment from and not pay stupid amounts of money to participate in like some other projects are trying to do.

Pen and Paper RPG: Pathfinder/D&D 5e

We’re not 100% locked in to a game system quite yet, but we do know we’re also going to be using some sweet pen and paper action to help develop our stories. What’s really cool about this line of effort is that our campaigns will affect each other using DMs that are tied into their own livemap that lays over the top of our Wurm Unlimited server map. So as people build new deeds and settlements in Wurm, our DMs will see that and can add to the stories that stem from the Points of Interest popping up being built by players in our servers. This will allow for adventuring parties to interact and build out our lore as well as work together (or against each other!). These games will be livestreamed if they’re in our game store or hosted by network DMs (ask in Discord how you too can join our growing empire!). The recordings of those livestreams will be linked on the website here so people can go back and watch them.

Longterm Plan

This will turn into our project to replace the rule system with our own design. The goal is to create a pen and paper RPG system that integrates with our tabletop miniatures game. Being unsatisfied with some of the current historic miniature rulesets, we want something that scales from typical RPG pen and paper systems to massive grand battles. It needs to work with individual miniatures and large battle lines with a simple ruleset that uses the same base stats and mechanics. We also want it to reflect actual combat with collapsing lines, flanking movements and the visceral and personal nature of warfare.

Life is Feudal: MMO

Life is Feudal has seen the rise and fall of Hyperion once again. Of course we have a love-hate relationship with Hyperion. It’s a very difficult undertaking to produce a whole player run kingdom and sometimes we or our allies end up with bullseyes on their backs. The honor typically goes to the Duchy of Wessex because they’re able to rally a whole lot of people and that tends to draw in some folks who just love drama and toxicity. Despite the drama and salt people feel towards Wessex they’ve always had SSR’s back and vice versa. SSR has played a critical role in the waxing and waning of Wessex (sometimes to the benefit and sometimes to the detriment of both communities). LiF was no different and continues to be no different as toxic elements of the community harbor so much salt towards them partly out of jealousy, but also out of simple human nature which makes that storyline so powerful. We’re rebuilding our effort in LiF to continue to explore the strong PvP and strategic elements of SSR. The Silver Sun Republic provided a critical coordinating element and battlefield presence through our ongoing command and control expertise in PvP on a tactical, operational, and strategic level in planning and execution roles.

Longterm Plan

SSR continues to find opportunities to stretch our minds and mouse clicks in PvP. There’s so much more to come in Life is Feudal and the competitive PvPers in our group have a whole lot more to give to our future adversaries. Our future games also plan to contain a competitive PvP aspect, so we need to stay connected to the community and despite LiF’s current state, there’s a belief that it can come back to … life … It provides us with a platform to maintain a competitive PvP element until we get our own projects off the ground.

Wrapping it All Up

There’s a lot to SSR and we have a lot of plans in the works. We’ve already acted on a few of them with even more coming to fruition soon. This is another step in the right direction and sometimes we need to take pause to explain to our community why we’re doing certain things to hopefully highlight what we all already know and that is that we’re full of motivated and intelligent gamers that are working to change our parts of the world whether that’s reality or virtual.

As always, hit us up on Discord to share your own visions or see how you can contribute to what we’ve got growing in the background.