

Our New Design Direction! (Vitality's New Playstyle!)



We have decided to shift the focus of Vitality even more towards towns and NPC's. Using our Age system we plan to gear Vitality towards a more Player controlled RTS style. When you spawn into a world, you will spawn in your home village, If you choose to play through the village evolution system, you start with 3 NPC's, cavemen at the start who have a limited number of jobs they can perform, you can assign these NPC's jobs, whilst continuing to do jobs yourself. For example, you can tell one NPC to go and chop down tree's, or to hunt for food. Bringing in these basic resources will allow you to build new Houses to bring in more NPC's, upgrade buildings to improve what they can do, gain research points to help you advance to the next age and more as you evolve.

An image showing the building info panel in Vitality



Each age will bring new jobs, new buildings and a new style of play!

We have 6 ages, each with a different gameplay focus:



-- First Era --

Prehistoric Age - Very basic gameplay, with more of a focus on survival than anything else, limited building capacity and tools, with a focus on team work in order to survive well. This age will be short however we still want it to have its charm, giving the player a feeling of being deep in this new, small world that they are slowely becoming a part of! Btw, be wary of the dinosaurs!



Stone Age - The introduction of more types of tools, and for the first time, proper weapons brings a new style to gameplay, with the skills of NPC's expanding to craftsman and fighters. Along with new creatures spawning and a vast set of new discoveries to be made!



-- Second Era --

Dark Age - As towns around you go, tensions mount, with players getting into new situations, more advanced communication is now coming to surface with a proper language for NPC's to use for interaction, as well as new jobs in towns, the evolution of farming and production, as well as new gameplay mechanics including trading. Not to mention again, more items at your disposal with constantly improving tools and a greater beginning for mining!



Middle Age - Your world is growing fast, moving forward into a shining new age, growing population, technology on the move, with new war systems, conflicts and new forming of smaller groups unsettling the peace! Developing story lines adding difficulties along the way, creating paths for the player to take! The threat of war looming over!



-- Third Era --

Industrial Age - Ah, the brink of technology, in this age you will see significant additions to the game, with the addition of complex machinery and the ability to build contraptions for just about anything as you progress through! Along with this comes a huge improvement to tools, and other resources, with towns starting to become very specialised with regard to production and trading!



Modern Age - The future is near, ever improving technology adding new means and style to the game, with new purposes and rockets mebbe :3!

Showing the building placement panel (WIP)



(Note: This will still be an optional style of play, and as you still control your character, you will be able to just adventure into the wild if you choose to do so, you can still advance the same, unlock the same materials and what not, however we really wanted to make towns a nice focus point for the game, and add some gameplay/story direction through them. When it comes to visiting other towns, you will still be able to interact as an individual, however you still interact on a town level too if you speak to the mayor or town leader!)



What is Vitality?

This is Vitality, A Randomly generated 2D RPG Packed with features to suite any kind of play style. Vitality has been designed to present the player with new challenges and a diverse world every time they play.



Naturally, Minecraft has been a huge inspiration for the game and whilst we love that game, there has always been something missing. Vitality is the game that we always wanted Minecraft to be, giving the player the freedom to do what they want whilst bringing the world to life with Villagers and creatures and creating goals for the players.



Our design philosophy for Vitality stems around advancement, your player will spawn into the world in the Prehistoric age, by learning and advancing, completing tasks, challenges and quests, getting into relationships with NPC's, going to war against villages, will all help you advance forward!

Villages during the Medieval Period at nighttime.



When us as developers enter the game, and find something which surprised us, then we know we have succeed. Unpredictable combinations of events which lead to new events happening are a fundamental part of open ended gameplay and we are attempting to hit the nail on the head with that! If we as developers, who know the game inside out can be surprised then we know the experience should be fantastic for the players!

Pre-alpha prototype state showing off cave generation



Our Kickstarter Campaign!



It is important for us to let you know how our project funds will be used and why they are needed.



In order for Vitality to be everything we want it to be, we really want to purchase a professional quality soundtrack and art assets where needed. We are primarily a team of programmers and whilst we can make great gameplay, our skills in other areas are not as great, which is why we need your help! The money raised from this campaign will primarily go towards increasing the level of fidelity of the game and creating an even more immersible experience for the player!

Rewards and Stretch Goals!

We greatly appreciate any support given during this project and we hope that it will be a fun and engaging experience for all! For the rewards, you should see them listed to the right of this text, anyway for any of the higher tier rewards, whilst we love user input and really want people to get involved, please keep ideas realistic! Likewise within' reason too, so not too jokey, we wouldn't want to break the theme of the game!



Seeing as we are such a small team, what we can offer for stretch goals is limited, however here are some of the ones we have down!

We are not expecting to reach them and have set them to be higher as these tasks will require longer development times and new software libraries in some cases.

Updates and Modifications



Our primary design philosophy on mods is that if a game requires mods straight off the bat, then we haven't done our jobs as developers to provide a deep experience for players, therefore unless our stretch goals are made, then we are likely to only implement mod support later in development when we slow down on releasing regular updates.



Our mod support when it does come will provide a simple and easy way for novice users to create new content for the game however at the same time will give greater functionality to those users who are more adept programmers and wish to mod the game.



Our main focus at this stage is releasing a fully functional game and keeping it interesting by releasing frequent updates, which aren't just limited to new content, but implement new mechanics as well! When the time comes, or user demand increases, we'll attempt to make a nice clean managed mod system for users to go away and create their own mechanics and mods whilst providing a vast function set for users to easily interface with the games elements.



Multiplayer



Multiplayer is a huge part of the modern gaming industry and naturally, we love creating Multiplayer as it increases the fun and playability of a game. Anyway, we currently have fully functioning multiplayer for currently implemented features. We wanted to make Multiplayer match the single player mode as much as possible so by default, all multiplayer will be like single player with friends, this goes for the storyline, world events and advancement/unlocks all happening between players.



The current multiplayer is designed for a smaller amount of players. One player will be the host and others will connect, we have setup the game this way as it increases the power of multiplayer and means that we don't need to recode everything twice to work between single player and Multiplayer.



In the future, we do plan to add some more multiplayer modes which differ from the standard gameplay, some ideas we've had so far are:



Survival Games: A group of players will be dropped in a pre-generated section of the world, they will all have a set period of time in which they can go and explore and craft weapons, gather resources etc, after this time, Pvp will activate and the last player standing will win.



Apocalypse: Players will spawn in a world overrun by the undead, will players choose to team up or go solo. This is an open ended mode however there will be a strong focus on survival and a more unforgiving end for players than in standard gameplay.





Our Mission



Vitality is no doubt an ambitious project, bringing all sorts of gameplay styles together and combining them into one awesome player driven experience has been our goal from the start, we don't want players to feel restricted by the games boundaries however the boundaries we have put in place keep the gameplay focused.

Our ideas behind the advancement systems was to reward the player where necessary and implement new surprise mechanics to keep the game interesting after hours of play. With our Age system, the player starting out at the basic Prehistoric age all the way through to the complexity of the space age allows us to introduce new mechanics as we go along. For example machinery and industry will only start to find their place in the industrial age, and up until then, each change brings new features and items to the table.



We didn't want to mimic human advancement, we wanted to be unique in that respect, and whilst milestones from reality have been put in place, our representation of those in game suite a different style, one that follows the much more traditional path which most RPG's tend to take.

Night time screenshot of Maple Forest biome

Future Plans and our Road plan

Our current road-plan aims for alpha testing to begin sometime in June, with Beta testing periods following after that in July and hopefully for release on Steam in August.

So far we have kept to our development deadlines well, and we hope to continue to do so in the future.



At our current stage, the game is still in prototyping however most of our core mechanics have been implemented, its just a matter of fleshing out the game with more content and gameplay systems to change up the gameplay.



Please Help us out by Voting for us on Steam Greenlight, It's Free :D!



In order for us to be able to release Vitality on steam when its been made, we would really appreciate it if you guys could help us out by voting for Vitality on Steam! Whilst there are other great distribution platforms, steam would be the ideal platform as their developer tools are unmatched! Link to Vitality on Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=138256748



We will be updating this information here throughout the campaign as well as answering any questions you guys may have!

Thank you!



The MantaGames Team.