Terrestria
Terrestria is a cross between a 2D platformer and Boulder Dash (who remembers Boulder Dash?) - and it’s also multiplayer! The real twist however, is that when you achieve something in game, whether that’s banking 5 gems at a time, or collecting a trophy, you get paid real money. How much you ask? Well, a few pennies. Still, it’s free money :) You get paid in a virtual currency called Fetti, which you can then cash out into PayPal. We never charge your PayPal account, so you can only win. To read more about the concept visit https://pinatagames.com.
The aim of the game is to collect gems and bank them in the gem banks you see dotted around. You can only carry 5 gems at a time. The game ends when someone collects the trophy.
You get awarded for the following things:
- Banking 5 gems at a time
- Banking a total of 10 gems without dying
- Banking a total of 25 gems without dying
- Banking a total of 50 gems without dying
- Banking a total of 75 gems without dying
- Collecting the trophy
You die if you get crushed by a rock or touch another player.
1 fetti is worth £0.01.
It’s still very much in the proof of concept stage, so there might be a few hiccups. In particular, there might be problems with lag (depending on your proximity to London). The game is a work in progress, and I intend to make continuous improvements in response to feedback.
Ultimately, the money will come from the game's revenue, but the game isn't monetised yet, so I've just added £50 of my own money. We'll see how long that lasts :)
Comments
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I'm checking back in and I must say that I like the new graphics. I also didn't have any issues with lag other than a slight delay every once in a while(it was hardly noticeable). I really like what you're doing and I'm hoping everything continues to move along smoothly for this game, but I really am hoping that everything goes well with your platform(?idk if that's the right term)
Hi Remkat, thanks for the encouragement. Glad the lag wasn't too bad. It seems to vary a lot, which is probably to do with the AWS hosting solution.
I can no longer log in to my pinata games account through the website or through terrestria's log-in
Yeah, sorry, there may be some service disruption at the moment as I attempt to fix things.
Lag issues may have been entirely on my end. Over the last few days, I've played a bit to see if I have the same problems, and I have not had any major issues with lag.
As a side note, I've only once seen anyone else playing and they were only there for a few seconds, so I can't offer feedback about anything directly related to multiplayer.
That's strange, it must be a bug. It's meant to restart after a few seconds. If you were to refresh the page it would probably work. I'll examine the server logs and see if I can reproduce the problem locally.
As for the multiplayer aspect, when I launched this game I expected more people would be drawn in due to the prospect of winning money (even though it's not much), so the map is designed for multiple players. I imagined that once all the gems were gone, people would go after the trophy, which would involve colliding with each other to erode the surrounding wall. I hoped the conflict between whether to cooperate or betray others would lead to interesting gameplay dynamics. As a single player game, it's a bit boring.
I'll be making a lot of changes in the coming weeks though. You'll notice I've already got rid of the ads. I'm going to get an artist to redo the graphics, and I'll add lots of new items like dynamite, doors, keys, levers, moving platforms, etc. There'll probably be a leaderboard too.
Yeah, I did notice the lack of advertisements. I really do like it so far as a simple-ish game. I'll be glad to see where its headed. Also, I'm not sure where the best place to say this would be(probably not here), but I can no longer view how much fetti I have earned. the achievement page seems fine, but the actual Fetti tab itself is blank. This isn't a major problem for me, but it seemed worth mentioning in case it was an issue you were unaware of.
Also, refreshing the game page has consistently worked, I was just unaware why the restarting was not working.
I apologize for the amount of comments I'm leaving, I am just trying to offer any feedback that I believe may be useful.
Thanks for the feedback, it's definitely useful :) I'm trying to fix some things at the moment, so Pinata may go down a few times.
Hi, Remkat. Thanks for your feedback.
The lag you're experiencing is probably due to the game being hosted in London. That does sound a bit worse than I expected though. I've noticed it seems to vary a lot, so you might want to try again later. Eventually, I may host the game in multiple locations, and have players automatically join the closest server. There also might be some tricks I can do to hide the latency.
The game is still a work in progress. It was initially just an experiment to test the viability of Pinata, which was going to be an ad platform, but I have new plans for it now. Instead, I'm going to focus more on the virtual currency aspect.
As for Terrestria, I'll soon be adding more features and hiring an artist to redo all the graphics, so it may change dramatically over the next few weeks.
I understand the issues, and I just wanted to make sure the problems were known. I anticipate seeing where these projects are headed. I am fascinated by your great work and hope for the best for you and everything you work on. : )