The View from the Village

[kniteracy]

How's everybody doing?

Kobbi, now age 53, is pretty much the village elder. He has fathered two children and is both an Adept Scientist and an Adept Farmer, though we mostly use his skills in the farming arena these days. At 53, he's classified as elderly, so I do not know how long he will live.

Kalea is actually slightly older than Kobbi, I notice now, at 54. She has remained childless and dedicated her life to the selfless study of science, helping her village conquer things like the ability to plant and harvest crops and the ability to build better huts. She remains curious about the ruins and the big, shiny stone, but seems unable to make that important breakthrough that would allow her full understanding. Like most pioneers of science, she will probably die before her true dreams are realised.

Rusha, at 50, has just crested the hill, apparently; she's also classified as elderly. She has borne one beautiful daughter and is a Master Scientist, with a strong concentration in Construction. She's helped take care of many important duties in her village.

Vava is 48 now, and she has borne one beautiful daughter. She continues to help progress the village's scientific research, but her main concentration is in Construction. As a Master Builder, she has led the village's construction and cleanup efforts.

Remember Little Turi, who drank the potion and reverted to the age of two? He is 27 now, and well on his way to a strong future in farming and science. In the next ten years, he will take some time off to concentrate on fathering some children, since the village's birthrate is low-- in something like 25 years, we've had only two births!

Sekai is Vava's daughter. She has just turned thirteen and is about to become an apprentice scientist, so that Rusha and Kalea can pass on their knowledge to the next generation. At fourteen, she'll be able to work, and her research skills are already good from her intelligent and insistent poking around on the island.

Tonga, Rusha's daughter born late in life, is three now! She enjoys playing, dancing, and investigating the berry bush.


What has happened? (Possible game spoilers below.)

Shortly after our last update, there was a typhoon which washed away the whole tribe's food supply. We had to dedicate as many resources as possible to replenishing the food supply, which meant that for the next several months, very little got done. Still, it was a learning experience. Luckily, we had already developed farming and harvesting before disaster struck, so it wasn't difficult.

Villagers began working earnestly both to clean up the beach and to clear the blockage in front of the lagoon, and now, after many years of dedicated work, we have a clean beach and a lagoon that's a joy to swim and play in. Our first self-created hut was built by Vava; it looks beautiful!

At this point, we know there is something going on with the odd field of dead flowers, we're not sure what the ruins are about, I know the cactus is medicinal but don't have a villager studying healing at the moment (must get that started), and we know we should really carve something into the shiny rock, but more research is apparently needed. We have solved three of twelve puzzles, and life continues at an alarming pace (I put the game on 'fast' so a day passes in half an hour!). Fishing is apparently beyond us until we get Level III farming, so we aren't messing much with that. Right now, everyone is enjoying the lagoon, scientific advancement should be coming a little more quickly than before since we have Science II now, and we hope to increase our population (I'm afraid Turi is really hoping Tonga reaches 18 soon) over the next few years so that our knowledge will not die with us.

Comments

[niquildrvr.livejournal.com]

I bought this game last night. You, my dear friend, are an evil temptress.

*off to see how my villagers fared during the night*

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

I am considering buying something that runs PalmOS to buy this game.

Eeeeeeeeeevil.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

*cackle*

My work here is done. ;)

[kendaer.livejournal.com]

*I* am hoping they come out with the window's version soon :) or (even better but less likely) the linux version.

You really are, in fact, *quite* evil since I really don't need another addiction :p

[telynor.livejournal.com]

*whistle*

[kendaer.livejournal.com]

Wench!! Wench, I say! :)

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Maaaybe.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Just wait till Spore comes out. I'm fully expecting to lose a WHOLE WEEK to that game ...

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

. . . Spore?

[almeda.livejournal.com]

New game from the creator of Sim City, The Sims, and many, many other Eloise!Porn games. It's a multilayered thing, where achieving a significant skill level in part A unlocks part B, and so on, with the following scheme, basically:

1. You start out controlling a one-celled organism. You have to swim around eating food-bits and avoiding predator-bits and poison-bits. When you have earned enough points (by eating), you get to 'lay an egg,' which you click to open the Critter Editor, where you can spend your earned points/cash on weapons, locomotive help, and other suchlike.
   
2. Lather, rinse, repeat, while slowly squirrelling away cash in your brain, surviving at ever-wider scales of multicellularity and ecosystems, until suddenly you become sentient. This level he calls the 'First-Person Eater' (as opposed to 'Shooter,' as there's no guns).
   
3. Now you can spend your points on tech, whether houses, fire, weapons, blah, blah. This is the 'Tribal' level. You can relate to other villages while you're improving your skills, growing your population, etc. Then
   
4. You have a city. This is the 'Sim City' level, as he puts it. Grow and learn and edit (EVERYTHING in this game is infinitely editable) and blah until suddenly you can access the next level
   
5. Which is the 'Civilization' level. Conquer, make friends, trade, whatever, using 'vehicle' units. And squirrel away cash to make your UFO, which opens up
   
6. The solar system. You can now visit other planets, steal their animals, terraform worlds, plant their animals and your animals, and generally play around with the sandbox, until you have enough points to engage in
   
7. INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL. Where you can play the Close Encounters Musical Tones game to do first contact, or any of eight or ten other mini-games.

Plus, he calls it the first Massively Single-Player Online Game ever. Since (as long as you let it) your game will call home with the cool stuff youv'e created in editors, posting them to their server, and then download OTHER people's cool stuff, randomly, to use to populate the rest of your ecosystem, planet, solar system, and galaxy.

This game is for me what Supernatural is for Seanan.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

*whimpers*

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Waugh! Flying parrots ate all my berries!!!! I have three decomposing corpses!

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Oh, no!

If your population and tech levels aren't high, I'd recommend starting a new game. Ew, decomposition. Do you have Spirituality? Don't try to get one villager to move a corpse: the game thinks they're trying to embrace!

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

It's quite sad really. Poor Kakua kept wandering back to the corpse of Rif and staring at it lovingly. All a bit "Wuthering Heights" for me, really. I've started a new game..

[telynor.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, this made me laugh. Just imagining the soundtrack. Of course, I was imagining the Ukulele Orchestra's rendition of "Wuthering Heights".... ;-)

[deborah_c]

*sneezes tea*

You really don't want that quoted out of context, you know :-)

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Gah! They don't make this for the pcket pc!

All they have for the pocket pc is " sim plant "

Heh.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

Sim.

Plant.

The mind *wobbles*.

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten all about this game, thank you (I think) for reminding me, I really need to buy a copy, the demo is fun, but way to limited.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

Hee! teamnoir has the game, and talked me into getting it for YC. She's not been able to play in a while though, because her Zodiac needs some TLC.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Advancing your Science as you have done is A Good Idea. Supposedly it makes the points you need to advance level accrue faster.

The dead flowers thing will be really cool when you get there. Like much of the stuff in the game, you have to get to a certain level before you can have it. The ruins are the same way. The last puzzle is the hardest. Without giving anything away, if conditions aren't Just Right, you can't solve it.

When you get Fishing it suddenly becomes much easier to feed the village.

One way some folks get the population up quickly is to turn one of the men into a breeder. Then you get this horny sonofabitch running around making all the ladies pregnant (or trying to). It's pretty funny. OTOH, having a man who is primarily a breeder tends to take your women out of commission because they're in that hut for a while creating babies instead of researching, farming, building, or healing. I always thought the smooching sounds they made were pretty funny.

FWIW, I played it mostly "fast" and found it still took nearly a week to complete the game.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

Curse you !! (Not really!)

Envy is a *sin* and I'm suffering.
A gane where you *do* make progress *without* having to fight people every few minutes.

Mind you, how would I ever dare sleep in case my people suffered a crisis ?

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

/me is totally prepared for the telynor to hate her for asking this but...

What the heck are you talking about and are these new characters in EOTW and if not when are us devoted fans going to hear more about EOTW!?? Hmmmm?

/me apologizes and shuffles off sheepishly muttering "some friend I am. greedy fan!"

[telynor.livejournal.com]

I'm playing a game on my PDA called Village Sim, where you get to guide a primative village through stages of development and solve fun puzzles.

Relevant entries:
http://telynor.livejournal.com/726852.html
http://telynor.livejournal.com/727151.html

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Having played some form of sim when it first came out and enjoyed it I actually figured that out. I was being snarky in a friendly sort of way which you deftly avoided. :-) But hey, it beats me being addicted to this stupid game called "no mess" which tarkrai beamed to me at boskone. (master's thesis? Yeah yeah I'll get to it... just one more game first!) Grin.

[telynor.livejournal.com]

*grin*

As for EOTW-- I don't know. Hopefully sometime.