Lots of news about the latest advancements in the game!

Another milestone is reached : the whole aspects of city management are now almost functional for alpha. There’s still many bugs, but most of those preventing completly from playing the game have been solved ( and there was loads!).

Most of the buildings and resources are completed and they are now all integrated into the game itself. For exemple there’s the mine, which from level 3 can possess mine shafts placed directly on deposits as an annex. On the same principle there’s the quarry and claypit. There’s the tannery who make clothes for our porcos. The brewery, the potter, the weapons manufacturer … A total of around 20 buildings each with four levels. Buildings production now sometimes give you the choice between several resources: an advanced tool maker can produce for example bronze tools or iron tools. There are dozens of resources each with its own graphism used for display in the warehouses. The icons of the buildings were made in a simple style, using black silhouettes representing the function of each building.

The server is beeing tested with two players ( a friend and myself ) and running successfully for the past two weeks to debug the most obvious issues.

Graphically, apart from the addition of all the buildings and resources, there is now porcos citizens walking by the streets as well as smoke and fires FXs on buildings. The system of decorative citizens is complex and based on the principle of  ”missions.” Depending on the total population and its constitution, a number of citizens is spawned and assigned with a mission. Although currently only one mission is made  (walking randomly across town ), there will be, at term, various missions consisting for exemple in going to the market and then back home or deliver a resource warehouse from an industry… etc..

The game is now v 0.403.

Memory management of the game has been greatly enhanced by implementing dynamic loading of sprites, which are now all stored externally to exe:  it allows an extremely simple and intuitive modding. Simply edit the files (. png) and reload the game to see the changes. I would advise not to inspect these folders at the beginning of the game to avoid beeing spoiled seeing all the high level buildings!

I don’t have the time to write a proper article, but here are some news for the few visitors of this website :

The buildings are now almost finish. Appart from 2 small buildings, they’re all complete and integrated to the game.

I have now started to clean up the city management part of the game, reparing all the broken menus and functionnalities one by one. This aspect of the game is now nearly completed ( at least what’s required for the alpha ).

This week i finished 2 more building : the Merchant and the Weaponsmith.
Only 6 more to go before moving to the next step!

The Merchant distributes ressources to the population, and the weaponsmith is used to craft all the weapons and armors required to recruit units.

Here are some preview of different finished buildings up to level 3. The Level 4 is still “confidential” so players will be able to discover it by themselves in the game!

The project has reached a turning point recently.

Until now, i was mainly doing the layout of the game. For each concept, i had to think and test a prototype : like for the terrain, city management, and lately the unit and battle system. The point was to find technical solutions for each aspect of the game, and check the feasibility of thoses solutions.

This layout step is now more or less finished, at least for the minimal core of the game. I have now moved on to finalising the content and stabilizing the code of all those prototypes, to create a functionnal small game : the alpha. It will allow players to basically manage the city ( ressource harvesting, growth, recuiting troops ) and attack/pillage other players.

More specifically, right now i’m finalising the buildings. There is 21 buildings with 4 levels of evolution. Once it’s done i’ll move to finalizing ressources, and units. After that i’ll finalize the code to make a working version of the game, and proceed to new tests with increasing number of players.

Considering the amount of free time i can spend on the project, it won’t be finished tomorrow, but it’s a big step to now work towards finalization of a working game. I can now almost see the finish line…

Units are now in the game, and i implemented the basics of the IA and real time battle display.

When two ennemy “formations” meet on the same tile of the world map, it triggers an automatic real time battle. Anyone looking at this tile at this moment will be able to witness the battle in real time.  The attacking army deploys on the border matching it’s provenance in the world map ( attacking from the North tile, South, East… ) , and the defending army deploys next to its campement on the tile. In cities, player would ideally be able to specify placement of each unit in case of an attack.

After this deployment, AI controlled troops move and fight each other. Psychological factors will make units flee or retreat : for now they just fight to the last pig standing. The 2 armies are then updated on the worldmap.