[WIP] Ark Azura - Single Player Story elements / Roleplay Community Mod

ARK AZURA is a roleplay server, just started, that uses a deep lore storyline to offer intruiging player-built content and enrich the player experience.

This mod is based on a Sci-Fi story of th esame name, and will comprise several aspects and amendments to the core game, for the purpose of improving Our Roleplay, and adding immersive content to ARK that could also improve the single player experience.

Environmental:

  1. “What lies beneath”: Additional Sci-fi levels designed in “shabby/steampunk tech” that represent the inner workings of the ARK as an artifical entity. These will be accessible through doors in the cave systems.

  2. “What god wants…” Additional sci-fi Levels designed in “sleek futuristic Tech” that represent the “pylons” or sky Towers. These will be accessible through portals that become available after certain conditions are fulfilled on the Ark.

Player systems:

  1. Additional Engrams: to represent career-based skill trees, that limit (and expand) the existing engram system.
    These will be represented by a simple colour system matching the Ark Tower system:

Verdant Green - Nature and taming skills.
Cobalt Blue - Technology and defensive skills.
Crimson Red - Weaponry and offensive skills.

Two other systems might be developed as secondary skill trees: Argent Silver and Onyx Black.

NPC models:

NPCs to progress storyline - such as Mercenaries, and an ARK A.I as well as “misfit creatures” from a time when the Genetic experimentation went wrong.

Additional items:

Buildable “Event items” such as a portable wormhole generator (required to open a doorway to new content).
Holographic Interfaces: consoles that allow information entries to be retrieved.
A typewrite / paper system to allow for more detailed information entries.


Obviously this is a huge undertaking, and I would appreciate help. I have a limited budget that I hope to put to good use - for example on models and scripting work, but of course I can’t afford a pro Development team. I’m hoping to get most of this done with a positive attitude and boundless curiosity.

Please mail or message me if you tihnk this is interesting, or check out our roleplay guideline at arkazura.shivtr.com


This mod is currently in progress.

It focuses in four separate areas:

1. New Engrams and Engram affinities.

Aligning to one of the three Ark Pylons will grant bonus attributes to players and allow them to pursue enhanced career choices.

We define three separate affinities:

  • Verdant Green – Nature.

  • Cobalt Blue – Technology.

  • Crimson Red – Weaponry.

By unlocking an alignment, values and capabilities from engrams will be affected, and a number of career paths can be chose from that give increased benefits to players using certain engrams.

Custom Engrams
Name Engram Points req. lvl req Description Dependency Bonus (at complete mastery)

Farmer 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to harvest rate and fertilizer efficiency Crops decay at 30% speed.
Armourer 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to armour creation (protection , resistances) works with any armour Armour repair = 50% cost
Soldier 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to ammo(?) damage / reload rate per level. works with any ammo except Red locked (traps + explosives). Ammo creation = 50% cost
Tamer 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to narcotic potency, tame rate and XP bonus to taming per level. works with any dino taming supplies = 80% of normal requirement.
Explorer 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to harvest (including chance for rares) and lowers agro range of wild dinos. global skill harvesting items do not need repair.
Builder 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 25, 35, 45, 55, 65 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants bonus to building including increased defense and less resources used for build / repair. building supplies = 80% of normal requirement.
harnessmaker 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 25, 35, 45, 55, 65 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants 2% bonus to saddle creation ( can make exotic saddles
WeaponSmith 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 per skill level Begins at: 25, 35, 45, 55, 65 Can sink 5 points per level into this skill: Grants bonus to weapon creation can make exotic weapons.

Certain engrams will be locked to affinities, meaning that players will be encouraged to diversify and cooperate. This will enhance cooperative play and role-play, as players can choose career paths that match their character stories.

2. New locations and levels.

We will develop small maps to represent “What lies beneath” the Ark and "inside the towers.

These will be story-line scenarios intended to further the Ark Azura lore and enable role-play interactions.

The Ark Azura story-line goes into considerable depth explaining some of the mysteries behind the Ark. These new levels will set the scene for those reveals.

3. NPC dialogue and interactions

To progress the story-line we will put some NPC characters in place.

Azura [A.I] A sentinet being that offers advice and pushes the story further.
The Sentinels: the “inhabitants” of the towers.
Various in-island natives.

Dialogue options will be simple to start with. “go here, do this” type instructions that after a while might be expanded to include proper quests.

4. Additional items and game objects

For example: Typewriter and printed page, as well as “Story-line items” such as clues and pages of notes from previous explorers.

Current status of this project:

Our team is two people and we look for more.
We have a repository in github.

  1. Engrams under work.
  2. Assets being purchased.
  3. NPCs being initialized. Dialogue system being chosen.
  4. Models being selected Assets being purchased.

We’ve purchased some marketplace assets and are looking for someone with a bit of level design experience to come in and help us.
Have you got experience making unreal levels? We look to do something simple and elegant.

This actually seems very interesting, can’t wait to see where it goes!

Really happy to report we have our first demo levels coming together: We use the sci-fi assets and have managed to import them into the Ark dev kit without any issues. I will make a pipeline thread later which I hope will be handy :slight_smile:

Now its just to get the nitty gritty details working. I hope that someone can help me with bounding boxes and such. Also we need to jhave a teleport function. Tjhe idea will be to create this level inside the obelisks, and have a mechanism that triggers a teleport.

if you have the skills - Help appreciated!

I’m really proud to say that we’ve released “The Little Things”… it’s basically my ARK fan fiction short story turned into an audiobook.

Eventually my hope is to integrate this into the Ark Azura mod - kind of similar to the Dear Esther audio trigger system… Basically by wandering the island and stepping into different interesting places you trigger the audio queues of the story.

Sadly my Developer quit on me for that project - so if you’re handy with mod kit I’d be very happy to get your help.
In the meantime I hope you enjoy!

Stream: https://soundcloud.com/shiv-mahon/se…-little-things
DL and community site: http://www.arkazura.com/