So we never took the time to explain our motivation behind maintaining and making citymania a great openttd community.
As most of you know we come from the luukland experience, that started the great novapolis experience, and we decided to continue the adventure. Our citybuilder mod is our masterpiece, the story of the citybuilder records and all the strategies we developed over the years to obtain that level of gaming is really interesting, and makes our community the one where you go to have an amazing gaming experience. We also have a great quest campaign, that still entertain several players and newcomers every week. Lastly but most important we benefited from the work of several key players and hackers/geeks to achieve to have perfect settings to ensure a great quality of the gaming experience.
We decided to continue the experience, dP, muxy and me, with the support of our moderators and friends team, and thanks to an amazing work from dP, we know have a highly customizable and manageable openttd platform, with a powerful frontend based on an efficient technology stack. The front doesn't show how powerful our system is, but dP keep coming with powerful new features, well thinked and working perfectly.
We are happy with what we did (at least I am ;) ), and we see a bright future for us ^^
Our motivation are simple, pursuing the gaming experience created by luukland and novapolis, we know have perfect foundations, and we are ready for more. Openttd is amazing, not everyone know it and this could be improved.
So I would like to hear all of your ideas to make our gaming experience better, and moreover attract more players, we miss the good old time of luukland busy evening games ;)
Some random thoughts:
- Improving the landing page : for now we have a blog style feature on our homepage, it's efficient, but we could add a static block of html to explain and sum up what you will find here: best citybuilder experience, gripping quest campaign, on demand goal servers with challenging game configuration, etc...
- A proper design: The design is basic, it works, it's efficient, but we could easily do a refresh on it. Our tech stack is that simple we could without too much trouble integrate any design so if you have some photoshop skills you could give it a try (we could open another thread for that in case).
- Some tournaments: we might not be ready to setup easily tournaments or specific game modes, but we are not far, and we could already think of some tournaments. Solo started a great thread about it, quite technical and high level, but with promising ideas, don't hesitate to read carefully, and give us your thoughts.
- Calendar of events : some tournaments would mean some calendar entries and some more frontend pages, I would love also to know when some players intend to play either coop or solo, and I would try a bit to be able to spectate or participate. Usually I'm around, but some players are not that free, so a sort of calendar were you could add blocks (morning, evening or late afternoon of next 10 days for exaple) and you would click on a block as citymania member to announce you would be around at that moment. Of course our server are irc linked and that works for some players, but that could be of interest.
- Social networking : twich and youtube could gain some new players, with proper settings, Saber and Gelidis streamings were valuables, I might try to automatize a bit streaming. Other networks are less interesting, facebook seems heavily out of the picture, but maybe twitter/reddit/imgur could help.
Give me your thoughts and don't hesitate to complete the list