Hey Folks. We are making great progress now! June was not a good month, there have been a few things to deal with like a new computer to set up and I got surgery, but just removal of metal parts. Also a bit of time went into setting up tasks for artists, one of witch I am still waiting for a reply and maybe I need another one. This week we will tackle Construction, Resource Gathering and just today finalized Production.

Resource management

Here is the new Production UI. Other than issuing individual goods per workbench or citizen, you will have one window to define how many resources should be produced. I plan to include 2 sliders, a min and a max amount value, here is how it should work.
When your total storage of a good is above max amount then the resource will not be produced. When it is below we will calculate a priority of this resource, so the production workers can choose which resource to produce next. In general, the higher the gap between available amount and max amount the higher the priority is. With the min slider you can even add priority, as the gap between it and available amount will also be included. All resources that are below the min value will be produced first. And to not limit production to just one resource we add currently produced items into account, so if 2 or 3 lines of production already produce an important material, the next worker might choose another material. All is just done in one simple formula. I also plan to include helpers to the UI, e.g. when your storages grow you should not have to increase each individual slider to match your storage capacity, same when your storage shrink. Similarly, the Trading window will be, here you adjust amount which can be sold and a reference price. Players of Anno (aka Dawn of Discovery) might be familiar with this.

Content improvement

I was able to revert some of the old assets to the new project. I had to make some adaptions but overall they fit in quite nicely. The placement system (how you place objects on the grid, and which grid size to use) was now finalized today. I am much happier with this than it was previously.
I think I even solved something that was never quite right. When you build your city you will go over different stages, first you have these weak tents, then your ugly, slum like shacks and later you can afford some more comfortable houses. The shack like buildings so are what is most interesting to me personally, you should be able to trade space vs quality of living and other negative aspects like hazard of illness and fire. Look at this image, it looks like a mess, but each house can be reached by just a small corridor. You are free to leave one or two tiles more between the buildings though.
Here is another image, not all of these things like the animas work already, but I wanted to make an impression of what we are going to tackle this and next month. I do plan to have everything working which you can see right there, including electricity which I missed to add to the image. Finally, here are some of the humans, textures are in progress now.
I know it is about time to get the first update out and I had a personal deadline for fall. We are working hard the next two months and I am at least trying to make this update in August for you to test. I believe, even when not everything is in place you will notice quickly why this step was done and where the game is heading now. One reason to have it released a bit later might be to add some more info like a simple tutorial, because I had to learn that shipping a tutorial of some kind is very important, even or especially at this early stage.

[ 2018-07-08 20:54:34 CET ] [ Original post ]