Mobocratic

Mobocratic

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Become the Master of Mobocrats - Part 1. Modding the courses and adding new missions
By vaiskivande
Do you want to become the Master of Mobocrats? If your answer is yes, you've come to the right place!

This is the first part of the official guide series provided by Proqet Studios that teaches you to become the Master of Mobocrats! We will start by learning how to mod new courses and missions to the game. These courses and missions are a great tool to create new objectives for everyday Mobocratic gameplays!
   
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Learning the basics

As we have announced, we have recently added Mobocratic a whole new feature that allows you to make new courses to the game. Each course has an unlimited amount of different missions that can have different objectives (or as we call them, triggers, because they trigger the mission to complete itself as they happen). We're now going to show you how to use that tool, and in this section of the guide, we will learn the basics about this whole new game system (in a pretty much all new game too).


So, let's begin! At first we have to open the game files. It's pretty straightforward, because you can just right click Mobocratic in your library, after which you select "Manage" and then finally "Browse local files". The file explorer will open.


Now, you need to select the folder "MobocraticFiles".


And then the directory "CourseFiles"...


Now we're home! At least, in the home of Courses! As you see, there's already a folder named "tutorial_English", and (this is maybe surprising) it's the folder for the tutorial that comes you with the game.


Let's make an example course about... making money! So we will give the directory maybe a bit too long name, creatingABusinessEmpire_English. Now, we will open the directory to actually make the new course there.


We wanted to make this a step by step guide. So, open the Notepad, please. Or continue to the next step, if this sounds just boring.


Ok, cool, now we have opened the Notepad. This is where the real work begins! Let's define the name for this new course. As we decided before, we will call this course with a name "Creating A Business Empire". This can maybe sound a bit too showy, but who cares? At least we will make this course a really great one!


Every course need also a tag. As the players call courses with names, a tag is the name for the computers. Because we have separated the names which the people use and tags that are used by computers, it's possible to have many courses with the same name. Now we're giving the course a pretty common tag, but we strongly recommend to give the course as unique tag you just could imagine. That's because if there are two different courses with the same names, the system behind the courses can work inproperly. The game will not crash, but your course will not work as it should.


And then we have to also tell the game that the language for this course is English. There just isn't any other option yet!


And now we have to get an idea for the first mission in our course... oh, I got it! We're gonna get the player make money with mines. So how can we do it?


The course system has a support for many different events in the game. We have listed all the events, and you can check them by clicking this link: https://proqetgames-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/contact_proqet_com/EW6P4SWSN8NAnzXYO24bPbgBFp5LNnJ6lBbasQq8TuOWcA?e=VJkgwB

Don't worry, this is just the link to Proqet's OneDrive server and to an Excel file there that has all the information needed for using these event triggers publicly listed.


As you see, currently the course system supports 57 different in-game events. Some of them have different values attached to them to define the difference between clicking a Court and a Flying Bird Pub on the map. Or, with another words, the difference between owning 10000 euros and 1000 euros.


Now we will check if we have any event triggers that would help us with implementing the "build a mine" objective. Oh, we found one! Let's use a event trigger that has the following setting:

tag=tryBuild textValue=[Building.Tag]

A tryBuild event means an in-game event where the player tries to build something on the map. In this case, a Mine. We will have to check the tag for the Mine, because it maybe isn't always just "Mine", but instead "greatPresidentialCastle" or something like that... I'm not hinting that we would ever use bad naming practices, but it's always better to be safe than sorry.


Luckily, this time the Mine was just "Mine". Just fine. We will refer to it in the course file.


So, now we have made the first version of our first mission. We now have just to save the course file before we can try it and check if it works.


So, to do that, we have to open a drop drown navigation menu by clicking "File" and then "Save as"... oh, well, we realized that you maybe know how to do that, right..?


The simplicity is sometimes deceptive. As in this case. Now you have to be strict. At first, don't save the file as a text file (.txt), because it isn't one. Select "All files" instead of that typical choice.


When talking about file extensions that the Mobocratic uses, there are four types of them. Overwhelmingly most of the files are ".parl" files. That's exactly all we have to know right now. So, after naming the file, we will write the extension ".parl" right after the file name.


Encoding the file matters! So, to ensure that your new course works as it it intended, please select the encoding "UTF-16 LE". After that, we're ready to save the course file and test this out!


WOW, it's working! As you see, the game gives every course a same default picture. Now, we're not happy with it, because we want make this course feel really unique to be distinct. You know what? It's possible.


What picture would fit best with the new course? Let me think about it... what about having a picture of a rich man? Let's find it out. CC Search[ccsearch.creativecommons.org] is always a good place to start from.


But, I have to admit, that in this case, I found a better one from Adobe's Picture Stock. Because we have the rights to use it, we will get this picture from there. I think it's cool enough for a course this great!


When we have the picture, let's move it to the same folder with our other course files and rename it to "graphics.jpeg". Just to make it look cleaner!


Because the course name is shown with a black font, I'll quickly add this picture a white vignette to make the text show better.


That's how it's done!


Abracadabra, here is it! The result looks pretty okay.
Even more possibilities!
In this section, we will dive deeper to the system and learn even more tricks to use it efficiently. The course system supports adding the missions some rewards that the player will get when the mission is completed. In this point, there can be two types of rewards - giving player a sum of money and/or another sum of satisfaction points. So, we will award the player with 1000 euros when the first mine is tried to be built. It's pretty easy, as you see! Just write the following: "completionReward_money=1000" You guess what the 1000 means, don't you?


Let's check if this is working in the game.


Yes, it seems it is. The game will tell the amount of money that the player will get by completing the mission. So, now it tells, rightly, that completing the mission "Let's Start The Mining Industry" gives the player 1000 euros (+1000€) reward. That's fine!


Every time a player completes a mission that has at least one of the following properties, the game will show a separate window telling about that epic event! These properties are:

  • Having the tag completionReward_money
  • Having the tag completionReward_satisfactionPoints
  • Having the property completionText defined

This happens in the picture below. As the mission "Let's Start The Mining Industry" is yet our courses only one, the game will also congratulate the player on completing the whole course. Unlike with missions, this will happen always with a course, despite the properties defined.


Oh, I realized that I told you about the completionText property. This is how you can define that one!


And it will work like this. Like a dream...


As you know, the missions can have sums of money and satisfaction points as their rewards. But did you know that they can also have both? In this case, both is better!


All right, this is working! As you see, I like always to check if my additions are really working as they should. Pretty good practice tho avoid nasty surprises.


In my opinion, every real course should have more than one mission. So, we will add one. This tag "ownMoney" seems interesting, let's use that for something...


The tag "ownMoney" and its cousin "ownSatisfactionPoints" are both very useful ones, because they allow rewarding the player for already having something. So if the players are rich enough, with these tags we can make them swim in money! Like trickle-down economics or what..?

So, I got the very brilliant idea to create a mission to have 7000 euros with a reward of 7000 euros. So, when you have 7000 euros in the government bank account, it will instantly be doubled to 14 000 if this course is activated. Sounds great, doesn't it?


These same rewards can also be added to the course itself, so after completing all missions in the course the players will got what they deserve. And it is... lots of cash!


The rewards for completing a whole course are showed in the upper right corner of the course screen.
Share them with others!
When writing this guide, we had unfortunately no yet implemented the Steam Workshop support for Mobocratic, so we have to do the mod sharing elsewhere. Such a place is the "Mobocratic Modding Centre" on our website http://www.proqet.com. In this section, you will learn the basics of sharing your creation there.


We will prepare our brave new course for sharing by adding our attribution to the course file. Just write the file a line "[CREATOR] name=Proqet_Studios", but remember to rename "Proqet_Studios" to the name or nickname you want to use.


When you have added your creator attribution to the course, every time somebody uses your course in their game your name will definitely be seen, so the credits go to the right place!


Before uploading the course to the Mobocratic Modding Centre, you have to compress its folder to a "zip." file, and here you see how to do that!


We suggest you to rename your compressed file name to a more informative one to ensure that people get some idea what this mod is about just by checking the file name.


So, now it's time to open http://www.proqet.com. On the front page, please click the text "Mobocratic Modding Centre". When a new page page opens, just scroll down.


Now it's time to do all the "paper work". For each upload, your system requires you the add the download your nickname, email address and also a description for your mod. You can use your creativity with the description, but it can also be a very short (but informative) one. Maybe you should tell more about your course than we did, but that's your decision!


Now, finally, let's press the button "Upload" and choose the mod file you want to upload. Notice that only ".zip" files are supported.


Voilà, we have done it! Our great new course is now uploaded to the Mobocratic Modding Centre.

We're at Proqet are actively monitoring the files uploaded to keep the Mobocratic Modding Centre clean. If you want to make sure we have checked the file on our website, please check the upload date and also the file description. We promise to check and scan every file uploaded in 48 hours (two days) after the upload. If we approve the upload, we will add the description the marking "[CHECKED BY PROQET]". If the file fails our checks, we will immediately remove the file from our server. To ensure we have checked the file, we strongly recommend you to be cautious when downloading anything that has been uploaded to the system under two days ago.

Thanks for reading the guide! Please be free to ask us anything about the course system in the comments, and we will tell you. And, most of all, be a Mobocrat.