Hello!
I’m an experienced game designer, and I’ve been working with the Unreal Engine now for far too long. I’m not new to Ark, but I also haven’t spent a huge amount of time in the dev kit (yet). I’d like to shortly begin putting together a new project, a small-medium scale map extension with mod content orientated towards cultivating a more direct PvP environment in Ark with a definitive victory condition. The objective of the mod is to encourage PvP across a large part of the game map, encourage players to undertake in-game activities that often fall more to the wayside, and to provide a highly configurable and replayable mod to server owners; a small amount of proceduralisation / randomisation and a healthy amount of config settings go a long way to achieving this.
I believe I can do all the work solo (I’ve intentionally limited the project scope to remain inside my competency), but it’s always quicker to have additional hands, particularly if they have experience or skills that I do not! I’d also love a set of eyes to look over what I’m proposing and let me know if I’m going to run into any issues, for example requiring access to game systems that I simply don’t have access to.
The concept behind Turf War is to create a map extension that adds a number of capture points and shrines to the map (and has a managing actor behind the scenes to coordinate the game content).
Firstly, there are a limited number of factions that tribes may pledge allegiance to and it is these factions that may take capture points on the map, rather than individual tribes. Tribes pledge allegiance to a given faction by having a tribe admin craft the flag of that faction; after which members of that tribe can only craft flags of that faction. It is possible we may later allow tribe admins to switch allegiance or allow individuals to pledge allegiance, but this is currently outside the scope of the project.
Capture points exist in pre-defined locations. It is possible there may be more possible locations than capture points, in which case we’ll spawn the capture point actors randomly across possible locations. Capture points are easily visible to the rest of the map as they use beams similar to beacons to mark their location - they are initially neutral, but can be taken and claimed by a tribe at any time by placing a faction flag in the capture point actor (they may only contain one flag) - at which point the beam will turn to the corresponding faction colour. When a faction has claimed all of the capture points, it is declared the winner - at this point it is no longer possible to capture points and the game should prepare to reset (would be great if it’s possible to script in the doomsday event, but I have a hunch that isn’t possible).
Shrines also exist in pre-defined locations, and once again it is also possible that there may be more possible locations than shrine points, and their locations will always be randomised. Shrines cannot be owned, and instead they act as unique crafting stations accessible to anyone in the game world. There are no two shrines of the same type in the game world, and each shrine provides unique bonuses - for example one shrine may give the player valuable items in exchange for crops, whereas another may do the same but for eggs. Shrines may potentially provide access to objects and materials that are otherwise normally difficult to get or entirely unobtainable.
Anyway, this is the concept, and I’d appreciate feedback. I’d like to get this done on the Island initially, at which point I imagine it would be quite trivial to create an additional map extension to support Scorched Earth, or any third parties who would like integration.
Thanks for reading, and let me know if you’re interested in giving me a hand!