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[Pitxardo]

And here we go with some gifs!






For the next update I will work in some more variety of plants, trees and rocks.

Also, I would like to change the Lord's movement into something smoother.

[Pitxardo]

Today's post is going to be a bit about the game design.
I would like to discuss two points for now: units and the scope of the game.

Units (warriors vs workers)

Today I found that I need to redesign everything related with squads and warriors.
Currently, every civilization has three squads that you can fill them recruiting warriors. Then, selecting the squad, you can give orders to each squad such as attack, defend or hunt.

There are three issues here.
First, it’s requires too much mouse clicks to manage the squads (click on squads’ menu, click one of the squads, click the action, click where to apply the action). Also, requires managing workers and warriors independently.
Second, during the peace periods, the player will have idle warriors consuming resources.
And last, internally the data structure can conflict with some ideas that I have for later.

The idea is to simplify the units management just removing any unit distinction between workers and warriors. This means that we will have just one kind of unit, the creatures of our civilization, and they could act as a workers or warriors.

The advantages of this are, we won’t need to micromanage too much, units are polyvalent (no useless units depending of the situation) and no conflicts with some nice ideas that I would like to implement in long term.

Disadvantages: Less micromanagement, and potentially worse performance (not an issue now).


Scope

Well… after the last images and gifs the scope of the game is starting to look big, and that’s dangerous. Chances of not finishing games are proportional to their scopes.

To avoid this, I would like to keep a good balance between creating something funny and easy to expand but simple at the same time. I know, this looks like a difficult formula to achieve.

Despite of the showed images and gifs in the last posts, for now I’m going to focus into the gameplay of just one planet. Let’s call it the “Planet Conqueror” stage.

During the Planet Conqueror stage, the player needs to conquer the actual planet. The way of conquering the planet is just eliminating any enemies to create a one unique civilization in the planet.

As soon as the game starts, the player’s civilization will have just a couple of starving units and a very basic town hall building. On the other side of the planet, another civilization with the same conditions will appear.
The player will need to start gathering resources to ensure the survival of his civilization and start evolving their units.

Evolution of the civilization will have two main branches: Technology and religion.
Technology branch will unlock new buildings and new technology to make our units more powerful and improve their survival rate.
Religion branch will unlock temple and similar buildings to make our Lord (MC) more powerful.

There is an idea of a third branch called “biology” that will make our units physically more powerful also unlocking some organic buildings. Some kind of Zergs from StarCraft. But we will put this idea on hold to keep the scope smaller.

Eventually, the player will need to battle their enemies until exterminate them. Once all are eliminated, the planet will be conquered, and we can consider this stage finished.

My target is to develop this first stage, making something funny and simple to play, but also full of possibilities.

The lateral 2D view is a handicap for the gameplay, because it’s limiting quite a lot the fun of building structures (think on Prison Architect and the joy of building rooms, walls, etc…). So, I need to find other ways to make this stage something that people will enjoy playing in different ways.

[Pitxardo]

As mentioned in the previous post and after a week of work, I changed how the units work removing squads and the distinction between warriors and workers.

This time the update doesn't contain anything visually interesting, since most of the changes were in the code and gameplay system.

But, at least I have updated how the flags with orders looks like and also the clouds sprites.







Hopefully, the next update will contain more stuff to show

[Pitxardo]

I have created a ghost to show it when a creature dies.





However, and despite of the cute ghost, also I will add some blood when a creature gets a hit or dies.

Also, I need to change the attack animation and add some impact effect, because it doesn't look nice at the moment.


On the other hand, now creatures can create buildings:



Here, probably I need to decrease the smoke speed during the working animation.

[Pitxardo]

I have changed the attack animation and added some blood:


DOUBLE K.O.!!!

Hopefully it looks much better now  



Also, I have slightly changed the smoke particles during construction animation:

[Pitxardo]

Now let's talk about the gameplay and the next dev steps to complete the first stage of the project.

Before we start, we can summarize the state of the art as follows.
 
We have planets, and each planet contains: three type of resources (wood, food and stone), sea tiles, tiles with different temperatures, a ground-cloud-ground water flow system, creatures divided by random creeps or civilizations, a basic battle system and a basic building system.

So… What about the gameplay?

For the first stage (and probably the first demo) we will need to use all this stuff and create a main target for the player.

The main target will be conquering the planet by killing any other civilization. But also we can add some more immediate and basic but also needed targets to achieve our main target: survive and evolve.
Survival is all about don’t let our creatures die. This means, we will need to ensure that our civilization’s food supply is good enough, we need to be able to repel any enemy or creep attack and we should avoid any natural danger (TBD).

At the beginning, our creatures will need to collect food from bushes or hunting creeps, and they will need to repel attacks using their bare hands. This is going to be a difficult time for our civilization, so we will need to evolve sooner or later.

And here it comes the technology tree!

This will be something like any other tech tree seen in games such as Civilization.

The player will need to choose which technology will be the next one to investigate, and when the technology is completed, new features and new investigation branches will be open.

Because one of my targets for this game is provide more or less unique situations in every game, each technology branch will lead into different unique and long paths.

If you choose one path you can continue that branch until anything related with that technology goes to high levels, or you can combine lower levels of different branches and never master anything.

Having all branches to their maximum properties should be difficult even almost impossible in one game.

Also, there is a special branch called Evolution, which will unlock two or three special techs each time and you will need to choose any of them blocking the rest.

This is the first draft of how is going to look the initial tech branch for the planned first demo:



It's small and it covers just a basic stage of our civilization, but I wanted to have small scope for the first demo. I'm still thinking that is somehow big.

Some explanations:
- Houses will increase the population limit
- Farms will allow you to cultivate and collect unlimited food from a tile
- With the Armory you can create the first basic weapons (club and throwable spear)
- Walls are self-explanatory.
- Towers will automatically throw spears to close enemies.
- Temple will allow creatures to pray to increase Lord’s energy.
- Laboratory will accelerate technology research.

If you have any question or feedback, please let me know. I will answer to everyone.

Happy development! 

[Pitxardo]

It's been a while since the last update because I have been working in some game mechanics and there was not too much to show.

For now, I will only explain one of the new features: the building menu.

Clicking on your own buildings, a new menu will appear with some actions such as repair or destroy.
Also, some buildings will need some units inside to make them work. For example, the farm will need one or two units inside to start the production of food.
Later, there will be buildings that can commit some special actions, so this menu will helpful for that.

And now, a gif to show a bit how it looks and works:


Don't kill me yet, the farm sprite is just a placeholder

[Pitxardo]

So far, the tech tree and the implementation for picking and researching new technologies is now completed.

This top part of the diagram has been implemented:



The evolution branch (see the previous diagram) because is way different to the rest will be done later.

Next task until the first demo:
- Draw pending buildings: temple, laboratory, walls and towers.
- Add some small details to show some extra info in the UI.
- Procedural vegetation and tile decoration.
- Implement Lord powers.
- Implement Evolution branch in tech research.

[EberKain]

The avatar reminds me of Rd Manhattan.   The map transition is cool as heck, wish Reus would have done something like that. 

[Pitxardo]

The avatar reminds me of Rd Manhattan.   The map transition is cool as heck, wish Reus would have done something like that. 

Yes, I got some inspiration from him 

Anyway, many of the sprites are just place holders, I still need to find what style I could give to this game.

For now, I'm just focused in building the base systems and trying to create a basic demo to check the traction and community opinion.

[Pitxardo]

I have been working in an unrelated project in the last weeks so I didn't have time to work on this one.

But this is still alive!

Some changes in the building sprites:

[Pitxardo]

I added some little details to the planet and now I have doubts about the art direction.

On one hand, I can do a kind of art style where the borders and lines are clean and sprites has high resolution.
On the other hand, I can do a more pixelated art style where the resolution of the sprite is low.

At the moment, I'm doing a dirty mix of both styles: houses, farms, clouds and creatures are high resolution, but the Lord, trees, small details are low resolution.




What style you prefer for this game?

[Pitxardo]

Ok... I think the low res style doesn't work well in this game.
I just downscaled the original sprite and there is a lot room for improvement, but I think is not going to work in a game full of camera zooms and rotations.

[Pitxardo]

Heeeeeello!!!  

It's been a while...  

But I'm back...  

I have some news...  

Let's say that... I have redesign the whole project!  

 


At some point in the last months, I was blocked with the idea.
After some testing with the prototype I couldn't find a way to make this game funny, and I was full of doubbts about the viability of this game. Also, everything was getting uneccesary complex for the expected scope.
So, finally I decided to redesign the project, totally change everything and almost start over again.

First, the scale of the game has totally changed, this means that not only the size of the things is different, but also the level of management and therefore the gameplay of the game.

Before:


After:


Now, there is much less micromanagement (no more direct controlling of the creatures).
The buildings and your civilization's citizens are much smaller, but everything is more populated.



The cities can't be managed directly anymore. They will evolve and expand by themselves if the conditions are good. You just need to ensure that those conditions are good.
Let's say that the cities are like pet characters in pet games such as Tamagotchi. In this games the pets evolve and act by themselves without our direct actions, but we need to take care of them through indirect actions such as giving them food, cleaning them or play with them.
In this case, we need to take care of the cities by growing vegetation in the area to improve the food production, making rain to allow vegetation to grow up, saving them from a meteor impact, etc...
At some point, they will be evolve enough that we won't need to take care about minor things anymore, and we can focus in bigger issues.


(construction accelerated for show purpose)

Also, as originally planned, the Lord (our main character; the red flying god) will have different powers to help and protect the civilization from different threats.
There are evolution powers (e.g.: growing vegetation in an area), defensive powers (e.g.: create a wall) and attacking powers (e.g.: fire balls).

With these powers you should help your civilization, but you can also decide to not...



One of the new ideas is to introduce some bits of arcade games adding shoots and fighting skills to make the Lord to fight against some dangers.


I hope that you would like this new direction of the game.