Hey,
I'd love to hear you guys' comments on this:
http://www.itu.dk/people/ofktoubro/3rdWorldFarmer/index_content.html
EditÃ, 22-04-2006:
The site is up with a slightly modified version.
Crits are welcome here or at the site forums :-)
link: 3rd World Farmer (http://www.3rdworldfarmer.com)
- Frederik
Interesting, are there no goal apart from surviving as many rounds as possible?
All my people died after a desperate 10 rounds.
I got 24 rounds, very enjoyable little game, funny how it's an almost lose lose situation. Although I started out pretty rough i think I got to about $150 before being wiped out my the army or something.
I also managed to survive for quite a while, with a tractor, a well and a cow, but then I just lost everything.
I get huge amounts of money relatively quickly, and once i got myself an elephant, a tractor, tons of peanuts a huge barn 4 chickens and a cow I lose everything. Is it just built so you can't do good?
I don't know what half the things do. What is the whole point of buying sheds, wells, or barns?
THis game is rigged! No matter how good you do you die. Its a sick joke! I HAD NO FAMILY AND A FAMILY MEMBER GOT SICK. WHAT THE HELL.
I think the concept of failure is the main point with this game :)
I figured out the secret to the game.
If you get to rich something happens (sickness, a bank failure, ect.) The secret is to keep your cash hovering around 50. I had one pig and 2 shovels, so that if i got low i could plant a few crops, but if not, i just lived off the pig. Im up to round 51 right now... Ill post a screenshot when my dude goes belly up
EDIT: Round 80! i added a donkey to my allstar team of poor farmers!
Edit2: We made it to round 101, but our donkey got us raided by gurilla warfare people. Now I'm back to the old format, only with 3 shovels instead of 2 shovels and a donkey. We had to sell my wife so i could afford a new pig.
Edit3: Round 120- DIsease and refugees keep killing my pigs. I am a lucky guy, its suprising that a guy who lives in the middle of nowhere on pennies, still manages to live 120 years.
Edit4: Level 125, I'm bored, and my dear pig was stolen, so I'm going to buy an elephant!
Edit5: I only had one precious year with my elephant before gurillas took him and consequently starved me to death.
(http://louislbooth.com/elephanty.GIF)
After playing a while it seems that things in the 3rd world (it's in the game name) are not so good. No matter what you do people will always starve there. :'(
Now I don't know if this is a message for us to change our minds, or it is to stop caring...
Well, then again, there's not neccecerily going to be geurilla warfare and bank failures and civil wars every few years... those are more long term things, and are more made to make the game a more constant playable than to show about the struggles of 3rd world farming.
And it's also a bit unfair to assume the second anyone gets money over $100's worth there's going to be a sudden civil war or something...
I wish they'd just explain what everything did... man...
126 years? No wonder your family is dead.
Well... two of them starved... two of them I exposed to toxic waste, thus killing them :-\
Living in the third world seems to be a blast! You get to ride an elephant, and you live for 126 years! I wanna move there too!
Hey guys, the 3rd World Farmer game has been updated and has a new site - some of you may have found it through my signature, but the rest should go play it right away :-) Crits are welcome here or at the 3rdWorldFarmer forums.
3rd World Farmer (http://www.3rdworldfarmer.com)
Wow, everything was going great. I had more than $500 bucks and cows, barns and still all family members. I bet I was the richest person in the 3rd world -- but then the game told me that I lost everything due to a civil war.
Really, the message is good presented in this game and interesting, but game design-wise the game sucks. It just kills all the fun when you lose everything you can build up after one or two years. I know that the situation is like this there, but still this doesn't make the game good or fun to play.
Yeah, I played it some time ago and liked it a lot, interestingly especially the design. Imho it's more of a statement than a compelling game, even if the statement is a little flawed. You know, it may sound cynical but if the game would be an accurate portrait of reality, Africa wouldn't have today's problems: their population would just die out.
In reality the population is still growing though, the problem is rather to feed the many newborns. So maybe the player should get some new kids regularly, no matter if he's very poor or not. All critics aside, kudos.
OMG - the 3rdworldfarmer site was mentioned at FARK.com yesterday
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2065132,
and now it's officially "farked"Ã,Â
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=farked
Anyone have experience with this kind of thing and how long it may take to wear off?
Looks like it wares of quickly since the site doesnt load... and i mean the 4rd world farmer site :(
No honestly the site doesnt load on my firefox browser :( anyway how about a high score page on your site ?
Gaah! Our web-hotel just closed down the site - seems their multi hosting server caused problems for other domains than just the 3rdworld-one once the fark-crowd swept in. And now our host can't live up to their "no-limit on traffic"-deal. Which seriously sucks, since it was actually the deal.
I've set up a temporary mirror here http://www.itu.dk/people/hermund/3wf/
We had hiscores - but none on the mirror. And no forums, they're lost in some database somewhere.
That's what happens when you get too popular.
You want to keep your popularity low, so you don't extend your bandwidth and end up with a net-famine.
Of course, there is still the problem of net-corporate ownership and flame wars, but if you keep your profile low by being uninteresting as I (http://www.cardboardlogic.com) do, you can keep going for a bit longer.
Just don't get a net-elephant (http://www.proporta.com/F03/i/elephant_camouflage_kit.jpg).
Heh, I like it - I just *might*get it.
Oh, and we got a new host :D So www.3rdworldfarmer.com (http://www.3rdworldfarmer.com) is up and running again.
So, I got advice to play the game again and ZOMG!
QuoteCongratulations, a new child was born this year!
Now the design is getting somewhere. Another suggestion I have is to credit users for their ideas though.
Credit the users - yes, we will do that - we have gotten loads of suggestions, some new and some that we had thought of ourselves and had to skip during production because of university deadlines and such - the forums at the site used to hold a lot of threads with these suggestions from people, but I'm having problems restoring them from the old site - although all threads are in an sql-file, new user ids and forum-ids at our new site make restoral a mess, so it'll have to be done manually when I have time for it. There will also be an updated official suggestion list so people don't keep suggesting the same things to us - we get a lot of those emails, and it would be hard to give everybody due credit this way. I think we will credit the best suggestions individually, and then maybe give collective credit to all the forum users because most of them contributed in some way.
I actually read a booklet by some design guru a while back who said it's always better to present a sort of unfinished concept first - it's the best way to get people involved and let them put their own ideas into the product. It will make people feel they are part of the project, and they will never forget that. And if you look at the amount of money game companies put into user testing and quality assurance, I think it makes sense for small developers to take public criticism and ask for suggestions. Sure some people are annoying, and your vanity can take some serious blows - but it's a way of getting for free what companies pay for. I'm kinda enjoying it. I only wish I had more time at the moment...
I finally finished a new and improved version of the 3rd World Farmer game!!
We were invited on national radio about the release, so about one million people heard about the game, and it's become fairly popular. The game is being used in economics, game design and geography classes in universities in us, canada and australia, so I'm quite happy. The new version is hosted at (www.arcadetown.com) as well as Danish Broadcasting Corporation game blog (www.dr.dk/spil).
Direct link to ArcadeTown version (http://www.arcadetown.com/3rdworldfarmer/game.asp)
This version has a lot of new features, and it addresses a lot of the ideas and critique we got on the earlier versions, including some from AGSers, I believe.
Check it out :)
I didn't get to play any previous versions, but this one seemed quite easy on the contrary what I read first here in the forums.
Anyhow the idea behind the game is great, good work.
I had brief opportunity to play a german game called Ecopolicy few months ago. Unless you've already seen it I think you might want to check it out.