Hi, I'm Ilona, the creator of Otherworld.fi

[Ilona]

Hi. I'm Ilona, an IT student from Finland. I created Otherworld in the spring of 2023 and have been developing it ever since. Technically it's the third version, the first version was from 2016-2017, while the second version was very short-lived and never really took off the ground, since I didn't get very far in coding it. I've made 606 commits to this project on Github since I added there (and that was when it had already been in development for 6 months). For comparison, the 2017 version was 86 commits and I had some collaborators, so they weren't all even my own.

Otherworld is primarily a crafting and traveling game, but it does include livestock that you can harvest for resources and horses that can be used to pull carts.

My favorite pet game is Pixel Cat's End. I started playing it in August, 2024.

 

[cpvr]

Hey there @Ilona, welcome to VPL! We are glad to have you on board. We also have a game development forum if you would like to share some insights or discuss anything related to game dev!

What originally inspired you to create your own game?

 

[Smithy]

Welcome @Ilona enjoy your time here.

 

[Ilona]

Hey there @Ilona, welcome to VPL! We are glad to have you on board. We also have a game development forum if you would like to share some insights or discuss anything related to game dev!

What originally inspired you to create your own game?

With the very first version, I got irritated that Cantr (another game I played at the time) was so slow to add new features and I wanted to create a game that has a wide array of fruits and vegetables, because cooking is something that's close to my heart (being a professional cook by my previous training).

The current version started off on an idea for a timer mechanic that does not require Cron jobs. The way it worked was, when the project initiator starts working on it, it calculates an end time, and once the end time is reached, the project will be completed the next time the user loads the page. Later I implemented checks using Javascript to monitor progress. What made this mechanic rigid was that the user had to actively work on the project, and the pause mechanic had recurring bugs. Also, the character could only work on one project at a time.

Nowadays, action points can be used to advance crafting and gathering projects and when you register participation on a project, Javascript keeps track of when the end time is reached and applies progress to the project. The actual end time is in the back end, so even if the user edited the end time in the front end, it would not cause the project to finish.

I also feel that Cantr's world is too big for the player base and so I started Otherworld with a compact world and have been adding zones when it becomes necessary to introduce new ingredients. The first 10 zones are fairly homogenous in terms of resources, with the exception of apples in the higher zones, so there is some repetition. If I were to rewrite the world, I would make places more unique, but the current way of defining location coordinates for the map is time-consuming, so it's not worth redoing the map with the current playerbase.