MaidenLand
Open world, open source, medieval fantasy RPG
Hi, I am developing tools for artists, level designers and developers inside of unity game engine.
The tools are being being professinally designed, are free open source and will cut short your development time and effort.
Moreover I have also decided to convert this to an exciting project as well which you can read here.
I will make your game design and artistic goals inside unity come alive but I cannot do this alone, I would need your generous support.
Donate to it in both cases and you will get a generous rewards.
About
This is the primary repository for an open world, open source RPG "MaidenLand".
Welcome to MaidenLand.
MaidenLand will be a community driven open world role playing game, where users can create their own stories, quests, characters and art and much more in a medieval fantasy world with a strong background story, theme, history, culture and lore.
The world of Maiden Land will be filled with lots of interesting characters, towns, cities and stories, inspired by medieval Scandinavia, the world of "Maiden Land" is divided into two lands masses with "Tribal Nord civilizations" to the north and "Saxons" in the "MaidenLand".
Maiden Land has rich background, history of its civilizations, culture, historical events, architecture and a main story line as well as a well defined protagonist and story characters.
Apart from main story line, users will recieve complete developer kits and tools to create new content; ranging from stories, quests, characters and locations to blacksmith and inventory items, the user created content can be sold using merchants and markets in "MaidenLands" to other users.
Typos, mistakes or incomplete details are expected document,.
Give your feedback at ObaidurRehman164@gmail.com.
The layout of this document, looks good on computer screen.
Media channels.
https://www.facebook.com/MiadenLands-107453851032220
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNk9Uvbcpws-Z8HPDSVVz8Q
https://www.patreon.com/MaidenLands
https://maiden-land-devlog.blogspot.com
Discord channel: MaidenLand#9336
Background and Story
MaidenLand is filled with magic and monsters, both as humans and beasts.
History
In the year 1106, one after the other, Saxon kingdoms fell to Nordic invasions. Saxon cities ravaged and plundered by pagans, populations killed and enslaved. Those who took refuge in deep forests found themselves and their families amongst monsters, magic and outlaws, with no food and armies to defend themselves, thousands werw killed. Those who survived the forests and massacare took up arms and organised resistance movements throughout the occupied territories.
Defenders of "A'Lia", a coastal city to the very end of MaidenLand, fought off the pagan invasion of 1106, the city resists the occupation forces even to this day. The city has since become a symbol of hope and light to all the resistance movements spread across MaidenLands.
"A'Lia" also serves as the last political and mililtry hub for all Saxons, and organizes all resistance and mililtary movements to hold on to the remaining trade routes, settlements and natural resources across MaidenLand.
Present day
11 years after the Nord invasion, the last Saxon city of "A'Lia" still resists, it has fortified its defences and coordinates the resistance movements. The Nords have gone weaker by years of infighting, struggle for power and constant raids by Saxon resistance forces.
The city of "" is an important mililtary and logistic hub, due to it's strong fortifications and fertile land surrounding it, it is quite further away from nearest Nord settlement, and has grown weaker by months of constant Saxon gorilla attack.
The Saxons army now marches towards "", and plans to lay seige to it until the Nords surrender, to increase their influence across MaidenLand and secure imortant trade routes and fertile lands.
Goals
The goal of this project is to create an immersive medieval fantasy world with a rich story, background, history and amazing art work, landscapes and vistas where users can create their own content as well; content such as quests, stories, locations and much more. User created content can be sold and purchased to other users through markets and merchants in the "MaidenLand".
Will it help in some other way as well ?
- Apart from a complete game, the goal of this project will be to develop an open source, plug and play, robust and complete game development framework for unity which will benefit anyone looking to develop their own game using unity as well as freelancers, small independent studios and start-ups, by providing them community driven battle tested tools.
- Developers will have a chance to contribute and test their skills, those who will contribute will have their part of budget share, collected through donations and crowd-funding, (amount will base on a criteria).
Art style & Concept art
MaidenLand will have a realistic art style, similar to bethesda's Skyrim. The world of "Maiden Land" is divided into two continents, and will have diverse landscapes features ranging from vast grass lands to snow covered montains, rivers and dense forests. In order to keep things constant and in harmony in terms of vegetation that grows in this land and physical features, the landscape of Russian is chosen.
Gameplay and game mechanics overview
The game is an open world RPG(Role playing game) played from third person point of view.
The main focus of the game world will not necessary be combat instead it will be story telling, immersion in the game world, beautiful level designs and vistas however combat will still be an essential part of this game.
Apart from a immersive world there would be polished and well crafted mechanics such as.
- inventory
- crafting
- branching dilogue
- branching stories
- dynamic day/night cycle and weather system
- intelligent NPCs
- exploration
- points of intrests
- dynamic combat
- party members
- markets and merchants
- sell or purchase property in MadenLand
- custom character
- bring costumes and art work
- create, modify with world tools
- and much more
Technical details overview
A complete blog is maintained, regarding tools that are being developed for MaidenLands.
Some of these tools are free and available open source for community.
The link to the blog is https://maiden-land-devlog.blogspot.com
World
- The world is 32 square km, and divided into two landmasses, with various terrain / landscape features such as mountains, rivers, grass lands and forests.
- Dynamic day time and weather system.
- Default unity's terrain system will be used.
- Custom foliage tools for foliage distribution, both as procedural as well as by manual hand painting and shaders will be developed.
- A terrain system similar to Colormap Ultra Terrain Shader 4.0 will be used for terrain shading available on unity asset store, will be developed for terrain shading. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/colormap-ultra-terrain-shader-4-0-67260#description.
- Landscape will be generated both procedurally using "World machine", as well as by hand painting individual areas for finer details.
- A procedural foilage distribution system will be developed for procedural vegetation scattering based on the following paper. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303973921_Procedural_Generation_of_Mediterranean_Environments. You are welcomed to read the reserch paper.
- Other useful and world building tools such as road system for rapidly creation road/paths using splines, object placement along a spline such as for fences etc, will also be developed for production to make level design and world building rapid and less time consuming.
- Officially art assets such as 3d models for villages, towns, castles, props, animations will be purchased from unity asset store, asset such as.
- https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/historic/medieval-castle-model-7601.
- https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/viking-village-13921.
- Programming will be completly done from scratch by the development team.
- Here are some of the images of vegetation tools in action, each tools has a clean and professional user interface designed to, it includes
- "GrassPatch tool", a tool to quickly create a grass patch
- "GeoPainter", a brush painting tool,
- "Area Foliage tool", scatters foliage in a user defined area,
- "Foliage simulation tool", simulates foliage on entire terrain using techniques as described in above mentioned paper.
Visit the blog linked above to learn more about wold editing tools.
AI
- GOAP or "goal oriented action planning" algorithm will be used for Non player characters's (NPCs) decision making, the actual implementation of algorithm will be based on GOAP algorithm as implemented in this book. https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Developers-Library/dp/1556220782.
- Unity builtin "NavMesh" will be used for NPC navigation.
- AI agents/NPCs behavious will be divided into two categories.
- Low level behaviours such as seek, flee, chase, hide, chat, gather, dialogue etc.
- Low level behaviours are then grouped as "action group" and arranged in GOAP planning algorithm, each group has an associated desiribility curve, at each frame groups are evaluated, thr group with highest desiribility gets evaluated and acts on the NPC.
- For AI/NPC sensory system(senses) a robust open source sensory system "UnitySensorySystem" will be used, however in order to integerate the "sensory system" into this project, the "sensory system" will require some minor modifications. The link to mentioned "sensory system". https://github.com/ntk4/UnitySensorySystem.
- Apart from above mentioned AI systems, custom tools will also be developed. One such tool, "Unity Location System" has already been developed.
The Location system allows creation of locations in the game world, with defined boundaries, important destinations in a location can also be marked.
A new location can be created anywhere in the game world or any existing gameobject can be converted to a location.
During the decision making the AI NPC agents can use these locations to get their relative location in game world, for example near "Old Inn", or to use them for navigation.
Other
- A graph system implementation will be used for a branching dilalogue, story as well as for quest editor, the implementation of graphs and other graphs related search algorithms will be based upon graphs implementation mentioned in this book https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Example-Wordware-Developers-Library/dp/1556220782.
Quest Editor
We have big expectations in terms of "quests" for "Maiden Lands". "The quests will be 100% non-linear and can be completed in any more then one way", quests will drive the story forward. (More info comming soon).
Timeline and MileStones
Timeline for entire MaidenLand development will be 1 complete year, since a lot of programming and technical tasks are already in progress.
Development Milestones will be divided, a separate team will be assigned for each milestone. Work on each milestone will begin instantly after budget allocated for its development is reached.
For convience the milestones are divided as such.
-
vegetation and foliage system
- procedural tool
- hand painting foliage tool
- specified area foliage tool
-
player and game mechanics
- character controllers
- inventory system
- crafting system
- item loot system
- dialogue system
-
developer tools
- quest editor
- story editor
- tools to create and design levels such villages and towns
- tools to add AI
-
level design and world building
- landscapes
- level design
- art work
- lightning
- creating mood and atmosphere
-
further world mechanics
- dynamic time of day
- dynamic weather system
- other game system
- etc
-
fine tuning, polishing, testing
- testing
- video demostration by developers of various tools and systems
-
fine tuning previous steps
- testing.
- optional enhancements
Development teams
Broadly development teams would be divided as
- Project lead and Public relations team.
- Story, theme and quest writers.
- Concept artists and art direction team.
- Programming and Engineering team.
- Environment art designers.
- Character Artists.
- Location teams and Level designers.
- Quest designers and Story team.
- Sound Designers.
- Beta testing team.
Each team would have a single responsibility, teams would work remotely.
"Project lead team" would be responsible for managing various affairs such as legal, licensing issues, collection and distribution of funds, making sure that project keep moving forward at a steady phase, keeping in touch with the audience and manage the "MaidenLand" social media accounts.
"Concepts art and Art direction team" will work with "Story, theme and quest writers" to keep consistency in art style, costumes, story and quests.
Any team member can be a part of more then one group at the same time. Registrations of teams and team members will begine shortly after collection of inital funds.
Donations / Crowd funding
I have spend past 7 to 8 months working full time on this ambitious project I worked on every single core aspect mostly technicals such as developing the tool sets and framework to be used by other developers, however I have to pay for other aspects which are out of my domain such as concept art and art direction. This project will also cost some part time developers as well,
First short term amount, upfront budget of 5000$ US Dollars, for various purposes such as
- centralize office.
- hiring developers and artists.
- paying part time developers.
- for utility bills, etc.
- concept art and
- media promotion
Monthly budget during the develpment would be around 1000$+ US Dollars, to keep the production at a steady rate and to pay for development teams.
Donations can be made using direct bank deposit or by becoming a patreon, both will earn rewards, benefits of contributions will be,
- Access to Proprietary tools ( AI, Story editor and Quest editor ).
- Free artwork.
- Early access.
Using western union.
- National ID card number: 32203-0191179-8.
- Mobile/Cell phone number: +923430285008.
Direct bank deposists.
- Account number: PK69BKIP0303400180820001.
- Swift code: BKIPPKKA.
Contacts.
- ObaidurRehman164@gmail.com.
- https://www.facebook.com/obaid.rehman.1044/.
- whatsapp +923430285008