Greetings, Slezak here. I was the owner of SleTech, the friendly conglomerate which provided all your Design or Technology needs, depending on which resource I felt like producing that round.
Basic description for those who have never played:
Rise of Blockland, abbreviated to RoB, is basically a resource-based economy simulator. You start with enough money to buy a small plot of land and build a baseplate and some production bricks. Over time, your production bricks make resources. You choose which resource you wish to produce and different actions require different resources.
- Food: Required to build anything. Food is not refunded when bricks are deleted.
- Materials: Required to build anything. Materials are refunded when bricks are deleted and the cost depends on the volume of the brick.
- Gas: Powers your handy-dandy jet boots.
- Technology: Required for events and FX paints. The event system is very limited to keep disruptions to a minimum. In fact, the only options are playSound, disappear, and bottomPrint.
- Engineering: Required to build specially-shaped bricks, such as ramps, rounds, trees, fences, etc.
- Design: Required if you want to build tall structures. Every 10 bricks of height increases the design requirement by 1 per brick. Design does not depend on brick volume, just height.
The main goals of the game are to wait for enough resources to open your store, sell them competitively, and take advantage of other stores to build an awesome structure to attract customers. Increasing your property value enough will give you perks such as more fruitful production and the ability to buy more properties.
Since resources take time to produce, the game can start out pretty slow, but ramps up as more people join. Of course, people can hoard their resources, but will not earn money fast enough to stay competitive. Also, "alliances" can form where several competing stores will agree to sell at the same price. To keep it fair, unsolicited advertising is not allowed in chat. Instead, people resort to building giant signs drawing peoples' attention to their (usually poorly-built) store.
One feature that used to be a part of RoB was property ratings. You were encouraged to rate properties every so often to claim "lot potential" which raised over time. Claiming this potential would result in an instant cash payment. Ratings ranged from 1-5 stars and you were encouraged to be fair with your ratings. Rating too extremely to one side would actually disable both extreme options for awhile, so you had to choose your "poor" and "epic" ratings carefully. If your build was rated highly, you'd get a slight production bonus. The reverse was true for the poor rating.
As restricting as this all sounds, it's surprisingly enticing, waiting for that perfect time to open your store for just $2 less than your competitor across the street. If anything, the restrictions actually catalyze creativity, rather than limiting it as one would suppose.
End explanation for new players.
I would absolutely love to see this come back. If I could think of some additional features I'd like to see, I would. However, it is too late at night for me to try to come up with anything, so I'll just leave it for now.
