Pirates Ahoy

This just came out yesterday. Putting a quick post up.

About:


First thing that impressed me most was that my little pirate ship was smoothly three-dimensional. I mean, Restaurant City was great and 3D and all, but in this one, you could rotate your ship in the water. And when you moved, it moved with the resistance you would expect from a boat making turns at sea. Just see for yourself if you don't get what I mean. Anyway... things to do in this game...

Quest-completion monsters cost 10 energy to fight, as
to 4-5 energy, and drop nothing. :( Boo.

Monsters. The typical creatures I've seen, being level 5, have been purple octopus, flying fish, angry bath duckies and most recently, melon-fish (pictured.) At first, I thought this game was going to be like Treasure Isle, which was a rather repetitive 'point-click-wait-and-see-what-you-get' game. I'll get to that later. So here, you kinda just boat around the expanse of sea and find, among other things, monsters that you fight at the cost of energy. If you win, the non-quest monsters drop a little crate with something inside. The quest monsters don't drop anything... and cost the most energy to fight. The catch is that there's a chance you may be defeated by the monsters. And since it takes about 15 minutes to regenerate a single unit of energy... well yea. I takes a while. But to be honest, I'm not complaining. This makes it a more playable-while-you-work kind of thing, with less pressure to keep checking back to use up energy for fear of wasted overflow. So that's about it for monsters.

Yey. My nature-friendly-ish island.

Headquarters. As part of your typical serving of Facebook games, you have your personal plot of land that you can arrange however you want. For mine, I was able to customize the blocks of land (what texture the top and sides were and whether or not they existed -- to shape my island). So pictured left, I decided to make two little huts. One junglish style, one tiki style. Kind of like how the three little pigs would decide to make their homes. They each have a little fruit market of their own as well. I chose to avoid the more modernized look cause that's around me everywhere already. Not so exciting. I also put a little tiki well/balcony thing, the island's resident single rose (like in Le Petit Prince) and a guardian stone cat. There's also a little pirate umbrella at the dock for chilling. ; ) But yea, being able to customize my own terrain free of cost was pretty awesome.

Workshops. You start out with a peg workshop. I found the types of workshop to be very creative/cute. You have your own private pirate headquarter. And you decide to make a little extra cash beyond the fighting and digging. So what do you do? You make pirate stuff. Like pegs. And breed parrots. But not just any parrots... while you don't actually get to interact with them, the choices they have pleased me greatly. The peg workshop ... well I'll leave you some surprises left unrevealed. : ) Anyway, so as I mentioned in an earlier post. I respect Playfish partially because of its nice art. And here I was not let down. These are just adorable. :3

The variety of parrots you can breed are very <3.

Quests. You have a little quest book where you can collect quests to break the monotony and give some direction. As of now, I have one story-line quest section on the left, and two mini quest ones on the right... Self explanatory.









Energy and Tools. I can't find an island fast enough right now to show you, but in my opinion, it's the more boring part of this game. You just have these variety of tools that you use for exploration. Then you point and click a spot. Wait 2-3 seconds while the animation plays out, and receive a little something... Depending on what you click on, you use different items and spend a variable amount of energy. One edge this game has over Treasure Isle is that you can search the waters as well, and are rewarded for cumulative clicks in the form of badges (i.e. you get one for using the net 300 times... and having the badge makes using the net faster. O Joy.)

Conclusion. Well yea. I guess that's all for now. This came out yesterday, but it's pretty darn good in terms of balance, being glitch-less, creativity with gameplay and ideas, grasping the essence of social gaming and extracting the best ideas from successful games out there, then putting them together. The use of percentages for energy effectively combats having to create many varieties of food for different leveled people. Which was pretty innovative, though not unheard of (World of Warcraft comes first to mind). We'll see where this goes. :) Requests for help/guides/information welcome via comments, though I think the short and very well done tutorial at the beginning of the game hits the nail on the head.

Edit: Ended after a bit. Addictive cause it was like scratchcards. Got over it.

Pirates Ahoy Wiki - apparently there's one out already... >.>

Chocolatier: Decadence 3 & Chocolatier: Sweet Society

Chocolatier: Decadence 3


Basically a game where you fly around to different areas in the world, obtaining your own luxury-edibles factories and buying/haggling for ingredients for these factories. Goal is to grow the company to its former glory and thus, become CEO of the confectionery.


My friend and I put together a spreadsheet with the prices of the ingredients and products, since there did not seem to be such a price list online. The products list is a bit untidied, so I'll provide the link for the spreadsheet as well as the chart for our observed ingredients prices. Umm. Too lazy to format this into a proper table. Check the ingredients and product pricing spreadsheet if you want to see the decent layout. If you want to format the table yourself, feel free to do so. The list isn't entirely complete, since we have not entirely dominated the game. There's probably a reason why this is a game people are not highly addicted to and raving about.

Supplemental Guide - Contains all the other information that would be a total waste of time for me to rewrite.

Chocolatier: Decadence 3 Ingredients Price List


Item  Lowest Highest
Allspice 71 155
Almonds 22 66
Amaretto 103 200
Anise 81 250
Balinese Cacao 705 900
Balinese Coffee 578 888
Black Tea 548 826
Blueberries 44 300
Butter 86 95
Cacao 8 57
Caramel 68 175
Cardamom Pods 1118 1300
Cashews 400 800
Cayenne Peppers 862 1424
Cherries 321 2000
Cinnamon 743 990
Cloves 475 623
Coconuts 334 542
Coffee Liqueur 0 0
Colombian Cacao 189 320
Columbian Coffee 401 510
Cream 12 77
Cuban Coffee 328 520
Currants 77 225
Dates 502 785
Doualan Cacao 77 160
Espresso Beans 300 500
Ginger 503 750
Hazelnuts 120 290
Honduran Cacao 335 468
Honey 233 322
Kona Coffee 123 340
Lemons 73 255
Lime 86 405
Macadamia nuts 709 1100
Mango 260 980
Maple Syrup 2384 2523
Milk 14 30
Mint 66 145
Moroccan Coffee 345 598
Nutmeg 1337 1632
Orange Liqueur 0 0
Oranges 90 299
Peanuts 71 169
Pecans 102 1471
Peruvian Cacao 570 864
Pistachios 895 1200
Pumpkins 314 950
Raspberries 138 912
Rose Petals 1840 2300
Saffron 3256 3956
Sea Salt 237 299
Sesame 786 916
Strawberries 513 1800
Sugar 5 29
Truffle Powder 425 675
Vanilla 1196 1466
Wasabi 704 949
Whipped Cream 53 117
Whiskey 500 750


Chocolatier: Decadence 3 Products Price List - Located on the second sheet, accessible via the tab the bottom left of the page.


... Oh yea, there's a game mechanic that basically allows you to have infinite cash in the game. Doesn't require other applications or anything. Just a few minutes... if interested, just comment and I'll bother going over the simple steps.


Chocolatier: Sweet Society

The "Shoppe" on the inside. I'd been trying to keep over 1k of each type, besides the ones with extremely low unit-production. Store decor would only look uglier if I tried to add any more, which is necessary to obtain higher ratings.

Facebook game based off of the Chocolatier concept. You create a large variety of chocolates. Customers that come in have a main and secondary preference of: bars, squares, truffles, pralines. If you have the main preference in stock, they're happy and buy more than one (3?). Secondary preference and they buy one or two. Not in stock and I think they just buy a generic one. Right now, having expanded my store to the largest size, there's not much I have left to do. The decoration prices are a bit ridiculous. A single square tile can cost an entire cash point, or 500 coin -- or it could cost 15 - 100 coins. The 100 and 500 coins tiles both give 1 decor point. More decor points you have, the higher Prestige rating. Higher Prestige rating supposedly means higher number of customers per minute. They're probably balanced all that right now but the only thing still holding me to the game is that chocolate doesn't rot if you leave it alone, and that the chocolates that take 18-72 hours to make allow me to decide how often I want to check back if I get bored. There's one for 5 min, 15, 20, 30 and 45 min and then 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12 hours besides the longer term ones.

The selection of display cases. The expensive ones were too ... ornate for my tastes ... if I had a chocolate shop, I'd be selling the chocolates, not the tables, which take attention away from the chocolates.

They also added different colour machines, with prices going up incrementally with no benefit. You can't sell items you bought yet, but they added the ability to open and close the shop.

The link is found here. You need a Facebook account to play, as far as I know. Having friends who play this seems to be (a weak) part of the game.

Empty and working machines. They just.. go round and round. And have timers.

EDIT: July 21st. And that is the end of the game for me. Have added screenshots of my game as I leave it.

Farmville ... Not Much to Say

So I had an instinctive repulsion to a game with such nasty graphics and boring gameplay. Months later, however, the monotony and ease of achievements lured me in to a point where I found pleasure in arranging the relatively ugly pixelated items around my farm. I disliked how Zynga encouraged friending a bunch of strangers, however, so I used my game account to accomplish goals that required such contact, and kept my main one clean.

As of these past few days, however, expanding the farm further requires 41 (?) friends. I have 18. Screw that. :<

A quick tour of my end product. There's the gigantic plot of farmland, of course. Since the aim of the game is farming, I figured... most of the land should be dedicated to that. There's the little flower garden walled in on the left. I was going for a Secret Garden sort of thing. Kind of. Below that are the herds of exotic sheep with the rudimentary housing and hammock. Above the garden is the trophy garden. I removed the golden gnomes sometime, and replaced it with some Japanese-themed garden material. Beyond that is a sort of European outdoor cafe area in front of a library. I chose to place the library of all the structures (botanical garden, grocery store, post office... etc) because that was one thing I would like -- my personal library.

I'm sure you could locate the following animal areas. There's the chicken area with ducks in their pond, two cow barns (nondescript), pig ... conference ... with the black pig presiding, penguin sledding area, two elephants on a date in a pine forest (don't ask), turtle orgy (they were all supposed to face towards the field in pyramid-formation, but then the jackfruit tree happened and I squished them all to the same side and .. yea), nursery/daycare, and easter hills with bunnies.

Additionally, there's a forest of hidden holiday objects, woodworking area with a decorative Mardi Gras tree, greenhouse/storage barn/hot air balloon, stables with a beehive in the making before it, hanging tomatoes for the bees to pollinate, swan/geese pond, ducks mesmerized by a windmill, sizable farmers market, and of course, the manor. I have a villa, cottage, snow resort and some other places but I felt the manor looked like the nicest place to live.

Bordering the map are a variety of trees -- mostly the ones I deemed less-ugly, or even nice-looking (lychee, mango, magnolia, cashew, starfruit...). If there's one thing Farmville has taught me, it's the names/appearance of some interesting trees.

Annnd. I guess that's all I have to say for Farmville, despite the apparent time I've spent on it. :<

Ratings for ever-changing are silly.

Restaurant City

I started Restaurant City ("RC" hereafter), by Playfish, a little over a year ago, around January 2009? It was pretty fun even when I started, and has seen constant improvements since. The first screen shot is from September 22, 2009. Following is one from June 27, 2010. At the beginning, RC did not have that little garden. That was added sometime as a tiny tribute to Country Story [link to that post coming later]. But the garden made the game a bit more fun.

Screeny from September 22, 2009. It was much simpler/basic then, but Playfish managed to add other things without making it too rambunctious over the next year or so. I still like how it looked.

I personally enjoyed watching little guys come into my restaurant, waiting to be seated/seating themselves, and then seeing my chefs start cooking and my waiters awaiting. At the beginning, part of the fun was also finding the most efficient layout, and the Playfish forums had a variety of guides on that. Later, someone introduced to me this live patching application that adjusted certain values in the game so that the customers would run around at super speeds, chefs would cook instantly and waiters would wait instantly. Occasionally, after a new version is made, some patching wouldn't work, but the author of the program would adjust the application to modify the new values and yea.

A few weeks ago, the guy stopped updated after patches, stating that he'd basically achieved all gold dishes and was going to update whenever he felt like. That was ok, because a few of the ones that were useful, such as instant cooking, still worked with the new major patch, which allowed employees to work hours players specified (as to in 4 hour shifts, after which you would need to feed employees or put them to sleep to regenerate energy).

Taken June 27, 2010. The little moon thing you see in the screenshot keeps the restaurant nighttime from the inside. That was given away upon 'mastering' a particular cocktail drink as part of the Lounge theme.

So now, I no longer have the pleasure of leaving the window open in the background to watch my employees smoothly serve the customers. If I leave them alone too long, the dirty dishes start to pile up and the number of disgruntled customers rise. :( Not a good sight/feeling. So now, I just ensure the restaurant has reached peak rating and save/quit. Oh well, less time wasted on staring at the little guys. It's like a little fish tank -- except instead of colourful exotic fish, it's colourful themed dishes, people and exciting restaurant action! Ok, maybe not that exciting. But it's fun to watch. :defensive pout:

Unlike Zynga's art, Playfish's art is more pleasing/appealing to my eye, with more tasteful themes and softer colours and edges.

Since Playfish games had managed to keep me entertained and interested for over a year, I did buy some Playfish cash from them -- all in the form of offers that provided me with actual items though, since the idea of paying for animated pixels that are no longer there when I quit is still rather disconcerting to me. So I got some flowers for my mother on Valentines day, I tried out New York Times subscription (not one ever reached my apartment, despite calls/emails. they were nice though, and credited me. even after I cancelled), got a Netflix trial (which I eventually came to pay for because I quit WoW and had to fill my spare time). ... So now I'm out of decent offers to fulfill. :(

Improvements

Some improvements that I have seen since I began playing are listed below. These creative and effective modifications have helped to keep me into this game. The weekly addition of generally tasteful new themes and items don't hurt either. Playfish also provides good stuff purchasable by just coins too, unlike Zynga, where the actual good stuff all cost real cash, while non-payers get shiddy shid. : / Hey. I do spend. But when I don't, I don't appreciate feeling like crap. Anyway.

• Garden expansion area. The garden area originally only allowed placement of certain decoration until they realized that it really limited decorating potential and creativity. The cost for expansion is quite steep, but they had a half-price sale for quite a while. Now the area is treated like any indoor area, except that it doesn't come with walls.
• More flexible employee up-time. As mentioned before, they changed the employee up-time so that you can have them up and about for up to 12 hours. If you let them email you, you can have them up for 24 hours. After this was implemented, Playfish eventually tweaked profits for 24 hours so people don't make almost nothing.
• Garden. Added a garden. Plants take 48 hours to become harvestable. Watering lasts 9 hours. Used to have to click three times to water (3 hours per click). As of the past few weeks, it has been changed to one click for 9 hours.
• Friend visiting rewards. Visiting friends used to net you about 15 coins a visit, which was not even close to being an incentive to visit friends. They changed that to 1000 coins for the first visit, 500 for the next two, 250 for the next four, 100 for the next ... two and 25 for the rest (I think.) Then they realized that was pretty generous, and might've seen a drop in sales for coins and Playfish Cash. Now it's 500 for the first two visits, 250 for the next three, and some other lesser numbers for the following. Fair enough, and kept people's interests.

Restaurant Front. Since I had bought a decorative item that gave all my customers bunny ears/suits, I decided to give my restaurant a bunny-cult-from-space theme.

• Interactive menus. Objects associated with menu items. First was the sushi bar. Maximum-level dishes on that list would be displayed on the little sushi bar. It was incentive. But not enough for people like me. Before the next item, there were some other menu items with prizes - such as a drink that, when maximized, would cause customers to shrink, menu items that gifted PlayFish Cash items. The next interactive item that came out was the Lounge Bar. Each maximized dish had a pretty good prize. These included a) an extra employee to man the bar, b) two prizes that increased bartender's working speed by 10%, c) extra seats (up to three) for the bar, d) an item that made it nighttime inside your restaurant all the time, e) something to make people sitting at the bar wait a second longer.
• Item Buffs. Certain stoves and fountains increased speed of serving (yes, mostly real-cash items, but they gave limited offers for a few that were ok as well, which was pretty nice.). Certain decorations increased popularity or increased customer wait time.

Gameplay Notes

The trading part is kind of fun, though as a tip for players -- having another account act as a sort of 'ingredient bank' to increase your choice of ingredients at any time is a good idea. Also, try to obtain ingredients in any way possible, because you usually get 1-3 per day, + 1 from the quiz. Then a few from gifts. A single dish generally expends anywhere from 3-4 ingredients. So level up once, and that's a day's worth of ingredients. A dish has 10 levels. so that's 30-40 ingredients to level a single dish. Consider the number of dishes. So yea, that's a long time to level them all. I'd focus on leveling the ones you want to serve most -- not just any that you happen to have ingredients for. Below is a general sample of the menu/ingredients needed, to give an idea...

These were some of the beginning recipes. Today, there are a good deal more creative recipes. Going to leave this post here, as this isn't meant to be an entire walkthrough (there are plenty of dedicated ones out there ;) ).

World of Warcraft

Type: MMO-RPG Subscription
Characters follow Blizzard's Warcraft lore as they level and engage in a variety of activities. Features an end-game, where some claim "the game really begins" that consists of an enhanced and formally documented continuation of the same activities.
PVE	PVP	Misc
-questing -instancing (dungeons) -raiding -achievements -pet/mount collection	-battlegrounds -arena	-professions -holidays events

The Introduction

When I met my buddy, he had a 20-some human warlock on Firetree. He didn't play it much, but my strongest memories of my introduction to the game was seeing him buying gear on the auction house, and bidding on some green or blue staff. I didn't understand much then. When he leveled, he had an add-on called FinalFantasylization so that when he ran around or engaged mobs, Final Fantasy music would play accordingly. He didn't play that much, but paid for his and his brother's account. So one day after school, I asked to try. Sometime between that introduction and the day I asked, he had created and leveled an undead priest on Akama. I looked through the character choices I had: undead, troll, orc, tauren. This as pre-Burning Crusade, so I did not have the luxury of a blood elf. They were all rather unappealing compared to the art I was used to, as are most of the graphics in the game.

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First Steps

My first character was a human paladin. I died several times between one and six, which was as far as I got. I wanted to help my buddy in any way possible, though. So I chose the least offensive-looking Horde character, the tauren. My buddy suggested I might like the animals, and speed boost I'd get with a hunter.

Thus...

Realm: Akama

Name: Muomuo

Race: Tauren

Class: Shaman

Sex: Female

Professions: Alchemy/Herbalism

Highest level: 27

As you may have deduced, the relationship with this character was not meant to last. I switched to my buddy's brother's account, since he'd stopped playing. At this time, buddy transferred his priest to Mug'thol, where I rerolled. Enter, Muomuo Reloaded.

Realm: Mug'thol -> Whisperwind (2010)

Name: Muomuo -> Sevstorm

Race: Tauren -> Draenei

Class: Shaman

Sex: Female

Professions: Mining/Skinning

Highest level: 72

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The Journey

Name: Nyxz

Realm: Mug'thol

Race: Blood Elf

Class: Hunter

Sex: Female

Professions: Herbalism/Alchemy

Highest level: 80

Leveling in Barrens with Turtle

Guised as Snowthing in Shimmery Flats

Kiting Omen Through Barrens

Downing Omen in Orgrimmar

People actually did this quite often those days (before it was possible to lose aggro to it), and would bring him into the auction house where the area of effect (aoe) damage would kill unsuspecting bidders/buyers... The screenies were the only time we accompanied someone kiting all the way from Moonglade though.

Anyway, there's alot more, and storing them in the 'cloud' might be more ideal for this sort of thing, so I may just upload them to Flickr and link it here. Just a few more screenies that mean a bit more.

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Today

Between the day I created that character and today...

At one point in time, I "refer-a-friend"-ed with my buddy, which contributed to at least three characters that got to 60 (2 leveled, 1.5 granted). Going to share some screenies I dug out from after I found out about screenshots.

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Socializing?! In WoW?!?!

First Summer Festival with the Maypole

Xmas in Orgrimmar

Mammoth Train in Dalaran

Protodrake Tower in Dalaran

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Raiding

Burning Crusade - Serpentshrine Cavern Guild Raid

Burning Crusade - Serpantshrine Cavern Guild Raid

Burning Crusade - Karazhan Guild Raid

Burning Crusade - Karazhan Chess Boss

WotLK - "Spectral Tiger" Mount, before Council (Icecrown Citadel)

WotLK - Downing Dreamwalker Guild Run (Iriz, paladin tank & offhealer)

WotLK - Before Sindragosa Guild Run

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Personal Affects

BC Bank Collection

Birthday Gift Windrider Pet : )

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Conclusion

Since this is a game in progress, and I don't mean to make this game specifically an entire walkthrough of what I've done, this is where I'll cut it for now. I update this Google Docs file every so often though. The file contains the information on the characters I play every so often, including their professions, main titles and any mount that lets them more unique.

Buddy got Dislodged Foreign Object today on that same shadowpriest. It's the biggest thing at the time of this writing. :P It was exciting for a bit.

EDIT: Many months later: Several 85s, raided heavily at level 80 as paladin tank and off-heal, became a raid leader for the guild, quit during Lich King due to classes. Final status of all characters.