Welcome to another Development Diary for the Legacy of the Firstborne Empire® Game. Today I’m going to be talking about the VIP system for the game. This is the system in which important people inhabit the virtual universe.
VIPs are important individuals throughout the game who do things like lead empires, and rule over planets. Each VIP has a race, gender, name, and history. VIPs interact with the universe around them and cause various events to happen throughout the game. There are three types of VIPs, Royalty, Nobility, and Celebrity.
Royalty VIPs come about either via being born into Royalty, usurping a throne, or by founding a new empire with a monarchy. Only royalty can rule over monarch empires.
Nobility VIPs come about either via being born as a Fourth generation of Royalty away from a royal leader, being born as nobility, claiming a planetary throne, or by being raised to nobility by a Monarch. Only Nobility and Royalty can rule over empires with nobility based planetary rule.
Celebrities come about either by being born to a celebrity, or via being generated by the game engine. Celebrities can later become Royalty or Nobility under certain circumstances. They are also the primary source of candidates for Democratic based imperial rule or planetary rule.
The racial traits of a VIP determines things about how they do things, giving them advantages in some areas and disadvantages in others. In addition to this, the effects of the racial traits of an empire leader are applied to the empire, where as the effects of the racial traits of a planetary leader are applied simply to a planet. This means that in democratic empires with multiple races, each change in leadership changes the bonuses the empire receives from their leader.
VIPs also have their own traits called VIP traits that give bonuses to themselves, and those they lead. These traits are things like ‘CRUEL’, or ‘BRAVE’, and have both positive and negative effects on things. Since each VIP has their own VIP traits, when an Monarchy leader dies and is replaced by their heir, the empire gets new bonuses to effect it.
VIPs can have a number of influences on the universe around them. Just as there are random diplomatic events that happen between empires. VIPs can trigger their own random events, arranging marriages, running off and eloping aliens, assassinating parents to claim the throne, kidnapping and torturing rivals, or more simple things such as being part of some famous holovid. These Random VIP events trigger for a number of VIPs each turn, making the Universe a more interesting place.
That’s all for this week. I’m going to be changing my schedule for releasing blog posts a bit. Instead of posting another Legacy of the Firstborne Empire® dev diary in two weeks, I’m instead going to do it in four. I’m going to be filling the rest of the weeks in between there with talk about my Avala: Spirits of the Mindscapes stories.
Next week I’m going to share things about the Avala universe and share some publishing updates. The week after that I’m going to release a teaser chapter from book 1. The week after that I’m going to talk more about Avala’s universe and share more publishing updates. Then the week after that I’m going to do another Dev Diary for Legacy of the Firstborne Empire.
Don’t forget to check out my new section of my site, the projects section found here. It shows my list of projects I am planning and working on, in order I plan to release them. Depending on how long publishing takes for each one, it could take anywhere from a year, to ten to make it to the point when I’ll be ready to publish the Legacy of the Firstborne Empire game. Check back to that section often to see new things added, or information on when projects will be released. As soon as I have information on release dates, they will go there.
Take care, and have a wonderful weekend.