LOAP Ultimate - don´t yawn this one is different

[Gurkengelee]

Life of a Peasant Ultimate
by Gurkengelee
Recent Version: 0.31 playable beta

Introduction

Before you turn your head away bored, please read this introduction. Yes this is another LOAP map but it is not like all the other clones out there. I thought about what all the other LOAPs lacks and came to the following list:

-interesting jobs, not just generic ones
-a gameplay that allows every player type to have fun in the map
-exciting possibilities for the "big three"
-content for early-, mid- and lategame
-a goal to work towards for every faction
-general interaction between the players

In the following text I will explain to you how I try to fix this lacks of the genre.

Player Types

I identified 3 different player types and I linked one hero attribute to each of them.

Strength - Thy typically B.Net Player. He is just in your map because there was no open Dota Game and he doesnt really want to know what your map is about. He wants to kill stuff and want a reward that allows him to kill even more stuff.

Agility - This type is more interested in the map and in the other players. He is not so much "fun for myself" but he got to the idea that a multiplayer game is more funny when playing with the other players.

Intelligence - My favourite type. He really wants to play your map. He is not "reading a tutorial? No why should I?" and he wants to see a nicely triggered map with a lot of options.

Interesting Jobs

Now that I have stated the steoreotypes of players I am able to make jobs so that every player style will find something to do. There are 10 jobs in the map for now and more will be added in the development. I´ll give you a brief overwiev over 3 jobs that are perfectly for one of the types above.

Arena

The Arena is perfectly for the strength type. He can slay enemies without caring much about what is going on in the map. Then he earns money and can buy weapons at the nearest weapon store to slay enemies at the next level and so on. There are 10 different levels and if you fight a set limit of battles you get the "Gladiator Skills" Trait which grants you a damage bonus and the ability to dogde and crit. If you fight even more battles you will get "Gladiator Skills" level 2 and so on up to level 5.

Thief

The thief is a nice agility job. You need to interact with other players but mostly in a negative way (at least for them). When you start the thieving career you get a skill which you can use to rob the NPCs peasants. If you rob enough you get more experienced and can now start to rob the other players. They get a message if you steal gold for them so you need to be quite stealthy so they do not kill you because of it. If you manage to steal enough gold from the other players you will get the ability to steal items too.
So you need to interact with the others but you do not really have to speak and haggle with them or such. Just be careful that they won´t kill you on sight

Doctor

The doctor is a tier 2 job meaning that you can´t get the job with your starting hero but have to level him up first because it needs 45 intelligence to become a doctor. For that he is exceptionally powerful. You need to produce medicine for the other players so they can battle each other (or the creeps) more effective and you can set the revive price every hero has to sell if he wants to revive! (it´s in percentage so you will always be able to revive) That leads to the situation that if you raise the price to high they might get angry at you but if you set it too low you will run out of money. Good luck



There are more jobs in town but none of them is a generic one but everything is coded to provide a unique experience.

The big three

There wasn´t so much to do for mafia, police and the drug guy in the earlier maps of the genre. This will change with LOAP Ultimate. The first change was to provide the players with a goal. The police must imprison the godfather and the druglord in order to win. The mafia needs to rescue his wife out of the police HQ and the druglord needs to make 100000 gold. Besides of that I will provide everyone of the big guys with a unique feeling, units and techtrees. This will allow them to also have fun in the map while battling each other. Of course the big three also follow my scheme above. The police is the intelligence type and will have much to do with prison management etc.. The mafia just needs to kill every cop that moves and break into the hq while the druglord has to sell his drugs without somone killing him.

Content

There will be enough content for every stage of the game. There are items at a wide range of prices, there are cars and helicopters there are houses and so on. Also the most jobs are providing you with bonus skills (like the gladiator ones mentioned above) if you do them long enough. That will also ensure that the game doesn´t run out in the middle. Of course the different tiers of jobs also help to give the players a clear line of progression in the game.

General interaction

Yeah the general multiplayer aspect was missing in LOAP as I seen it. So I want to change that and I have some ideas. For starters there are taxes. Police and Mafia can raise Security Tax/Protection Money that the peasants have to pay if they don´t declare otherwise. That´s one element cause if you want to be a successfull Police/Mafioso you need to "convince" as many players as possible to pay taxes to you. Another idea are the jobs themselves. Take the doctor for example, he really has influence on all the other players through the revive price. Or the thief who can cause much troubles to the other players. Generally speaking there should be much more action between the players going on.

The map can be downloaded here. Please tell me what you think about it, report bugs and ideas and suggestions are welcome too.