Ideas for new content

[Kamaeru]

So I'm at a point where the game is 99% fully playable. After watching developers sit on the server and do nothing for literally a decade, I never thought it would have been this easy to get the game working.

Using tools like OLNE, Gonstruct, and tile-editor allows me to get work done that used to take weeks to complete in a matter of hours.

Now I am considering where to take the server. I have enough unused graphics from the Bomy Island project to really sustain quite a few updates for stuff I can retool and add like Bomber Arena, new hat shops, new jobs like Bug Catching, and possible updates to the UI and existing items.

The big thing I'm brainstorming (and really my realm of experience), is in creating a string of new Quests. And I'm hoping for input from the community as to which avenue would please the largest amount of players.

On one hand, Graal2001 already has a few quests. From my testing they work pretty well, with some minor glitches to be expected of course. One thing I've noticed is that the style of quest isn't really uniform serverwide. You have Stefan's Quest being an experimental multiplayer Four-Swords like situation, which really is a great piece of Graal history. Then you have the Bomy Moon Quest which is kind of silly but had some good work put into the bosses. You have Zalactic Labs which is really experimental and cool, but the execution could be much better. For Zalactic Labs what I want to do is keep that idea of a 2D scrolling dungeon, but update the tileset to be more like Super Metroid (right now it looks hideous). There is the fish quest which sees the player transformed into a hilariously strange fish monster, but really this is actually the most well thought-out and well executed quest if I do say so.

All of these quests are unique and fun, and so I intend on keeping them. Lastly I want to mention a different kind of quest, the Pyramid quest. It can be found underground in the southwest part of Mt. Antora. This quest is actually quite good. I'd look at it as a Ultima-like quest where the challenge is to be able to defeat all of the baddies to collect keys and progress through the dungeon. It's really difficult, but going here and defeating these baddies allows the player to gain EXP for a small but fulfilling RPG-like upgrade system to Kung-Fu (which the player starts with) and the Bamboo Rod (which is what the weapons on Kingdoms are loosely based on). There used to be more dungeons like this but they used Kingdoms graphics so they are no longer available.

So really I have two very different options and I want your help to decide which will be better:

I can either make more grindy level-up "Ultima-like" or episodic dungeons where the main goal is to defeat hordes of difficult baddies, or..

I can make a new paradigm of dungeons that is much more Zelda-like and object-based, complete with puzzles, switches, minibosses that give you new weapons, etc.

The third option is that I could do both, but I would really like everything I create to be concise and practical from here on out. For instance if I go the Zelda-like route I personally know for a fact this will allow me to make adventuring more engaging for the player. On the other hand Graal2001 has always been more about grinding, but not exclusively.

Another idea to throw out there is that some of the quests can be Kingdom-related.