Hey there TIGSource!
It's been a while - my
last devlog fell into the zone of neglect a couple years ago, along with the project a few months later. I've been tinkering on stuff since then though, and thought I'd share the latest thing I'm working on!
BUREAU is kind of similar to Civ, but with an tight focus on individual characters. You're the leader of an secret society of magi in medieval France, and your task is to grow the Order as you see fit, while keeping out of the crosshairs of the Church, whose Knight Templars are completely immune to magic.
I've got several ideas for which direction to take it actually, and that describes one of them. I'm trying to focus on core gameplay and prototyping first, and then grow the game from there.
The gameplay will be management focused, as you train up apprentices into fully fledged magi, assign tasks to your magi (like enchantment, research or information gathering), and react to events like dragon attacks, rogue magi or plagues.
Visually it'll be pretty abstracted, the idea being that the game gives you just enough information for your imagination to fill in the blanks. It won't be completely text-based, but will probably be pretty text heavy. This is partly because I feel like that's an interesting avenue for development, and partly to avoid having to make heaps of art.
I'm making it in
OpenTK using C#, which means that I should theoretically be able to build it to PC, Mac and Linux, although so far I've only got a working PC build.
Where I'm at at the moment:
(Fullsize
here)
I've got the map working, and you can command the magi to go to different locations, and then hit the End Turn button (that weird square in the bottom right corner) to make them go there. Next up I think I've got to get some kind of "information card" working so that you can click on a magus and get their information. I also realised today that I haven't actually planned out the system of magic, so I spent a bit of time on that, but will probably need to spend some more.
I'm working on this in my spare time, so no idea how long until I've got a playable build somewhere... it's a project I started as a pure hobby/fun thing, but I am starting to get the feeling that I miiight actually be able to get it to the point that it'll be playable.
It is pretty experimental, and there are a definitely a few obstacles that I'm going to hit - I still don't really know what you're going to be spending most of your time actually doing in the game, or what the flow is going to be like. It's been fun so far though
