Multiplayer, single player and more UIs

Online multiplayer and offline single player

So I’ve been thinking.

Perhaps the offline single player mode in Rituals of the old should be free. You could just download the game and start playing without paying us anything.

It wouldn’t be “free” to play (with hidden costs) it would just be free, plain and simple.

This way Rituals of the old would reach a lot more people. You would be able to try it out and experience and enjoy the full single player game play even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on entertainment or if you’re unsure whether you’d even like the game - try it out, it’s free! Kind of.

As a means of income and to insure the continued development and survival of Rituals of the old we would be selling - not the game - but multiplayer accounts.

To sum it up:

- Free offline single player.

- Non-free online multiplayer.

Sounds like a plan?

Software piracy

Software piracy is unavoidable. There’s no going around that fact. It is happening all around and it is going to happen to Rituals of the old too - even if we do add a free offline single player game mode.

Someone is going to work around our online authentication servers and release a modified client which will be able to play on cracked servers without paying us anything for our efforts.

It doesn’t bother me much. It’s just how the world works and it cannot be prevented.

Those who like our game are going to buy it to support us (thank you).

Those who don’t have the money and who like our game might be tempted to download a pirated copy. But even if they do it doesn’t really harm us that much because they didn’t have any money in the first place. So duh? Some of them will buy the game later on when they have money (thank you).

Those who do have the money, but who don’t like to pay for stuff - they are not going to magically change their attitudes for us and will just keep on pirating (yarr!) They were never going to be our customers. So that doesn’t really harm us either.

So does software piracy hurt people and ruin lives? I don’t know. Probably not. But I do know that it’s stupid to go after normal people who are not profiting from it in terms of money.

More UI mockups: the launcher

Here are a couple of UI mockups for our launcher. They are missing some decorations and graphics but you get the general idea.

Here is what you will basically see when you launch the game:

It’s not a final version and might change somewhat along the way.

Don’t have a multiplayer account? OK. Let’s click the “create account” right there... *click*:

It’s still missing the help symbols next to the text fields which on a mouse over would show you more detailed information about the fields.

This probably needs to be dumbed down a bit or we need to add an intro or popup or something explaining things like “what account?”, “why do I need this?”, etc.

Still a lot of work and fine tuning to be done here.

This article was updated on 21/10/18 @ 01:39