Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mephansteras]

I'd say go with Option 1. Seems like the most natural choice for a game like this.

[telkoth]

I already listed all those things I added, but here's a video demo, in case you want to see it in action http://youtu.be/9nfpXtno6qE

[telkoth]

demo video! http://youtu.be/xfKJRolIMIY

summary: I got a bit distracted with Skyrim (Steam had all the expansions on sale for super-cheap), but I finally got back to A Little Wilderness starting yesterday, and got some good progress done on weather - both mathematically, and graphically (rain!) - and created the proper UI for the pause and event log history screens.

[telkoth]

today I took my little weather simulation engine and plopped it into its own program, so I could run through years of simulation in seconds. I had it dump the results of these simulations to CSV, so I could load it up in "excel":



with this, I was finally able to get temperature under control, and identify a bug in the precipitation logic that would occasionally manifest in the form of ENDLESS RAIN for a colony.

now that this is done, I'll start on things like rain waking colonists from sleep, colonists sleeping in house, and maybe even a little hypothermia (and colonists trying to avoid this by staying indoors, or at least near fires!)

[GiglameshDespair]

Well, obviously it's teleporting itself to England for the endless rain.

Having discrete blocks of constant levels of precipitation is a little odd. Maybe have it build up and down in heaviness a little i neach rain segment?

[telkoth]

the rain does build and taper off a little, however the spreadsheet is only showing every 4500 frames of animation (the number in the first column is the frame count for the "week"... every apparent day represents a calendar week), so we're not seeing those details. (same with the cloud count: they enter in, one at a time, from the left or right, depending on the direction of the wind; they don't just *poof* appear in groups of five )

[GiglameshDespair]

Ah, i see. never mind that then.

[telkoth]

I've started work on colonists getting feelings, including the feeling of "wet", which... I can't tell if that's a silly way to implement it or not - it may change.

but more than that, I finally got the "colonist manager" in place:



space is a concern, so I resorted to those little job icons. since I know those may not make sense, or even that the entire screen itself may not make sense, I created this help screen as well:



I definitely want the game to explain itself where possible, but some UI screens... I dunno. it's tricky.

also (and speaking of tricky UIs): clicking on a colonist's name from this screen centers the view on that colonist, and selects him/her (the colonist manager remains up, but you can see this change in the background). this is completely undocumented by the help page >_> HMM. but a feature like this just has to be in the game somewhere, so I shoved it in here for now.


and speaking more of UIs, you may notice I changed up the buttons on the right side a little. the little dialog bubble pops open the message history, and the book icon isn't implemented yet, but it's going to be a journal with entries written by your colonists. new entries will not be super-common, and so the icon will flash when there are new entries.

things I plan to put in here include include tips to get new players started...

"We finally arrived! As night approaches, I think about BUILDING A SHELTER. We'll have to CUT DOWN A LOT OF TREES to get the wood required, but the work will be well worth it!" <-- if the player has not begun building anything after half the day has gone by; tweaked according to whether they have any wood or not, etc

... as well as information about events that may soon come:

"We were given this land under the promise that we improve and maintain it... but I wonder: who's even checking in on these things?"

or:

"the US and native American tribes have not been on good terms. I hope that, should we meet with natives, we can prove our good intentions." or some-such

or even just personal life events that you may have missed:

"my wife is pregnant! how delightful!"

etc.

[burningpet]

nice progress so far.

i love the squirrels, again, those animations really add a lot.

I took the liberty of making you a little logo, and by took liberty, i mean i took liberty in changing your game name 



The bit thingy maybe throw to the low bits of the character art.

I stole the caravan from google images, so if you like this logo, let me know and ill paint one myself.

[telkoth]

I think I'd be more OK with a name change if I hadn't already bought the domain name alittlewilderness.com and thrown a blog up on there >_> I may have jumped the gun on that... I'm also kind of regretting the name for not including the phrase "oregon trail" in it, since that's the whole setting. I've been wondering if I should call it, like, "A Little Wilderness: After The Oregon Trail", or something, but I kind of hate how every game and its mother needs to be called "Game Name: The Cool Sounding Secondary Title", sooooo... I dunno.

ANYWAY! that is a wonderful graphic! including the wagon is perfect - that alone says "oregon trail" clearly enough that maybe I don't need to put it in words I'd be delighted to use it! the title screen would need some re-jiggering to work it in, but that's fine

(a random thought: would it make sense to use the wagon and oxen graphics from the game - sepiafied! - in the logo, or would that look absurd/terrible? )

[burningpet]

I thought about that (using the ingame assests) but it in a different graphical language to the rest of the logo..

So shall i change it to "A Little Wilderness"?

[telkoth]

yeah, I think I'd better stick with "A Little Wilderness" for the time being.

thanks for putting this together! you've definitely got a skill for graphics that I do not!

[burningpet]

hows that?



Thought i'd show a bit of trail in there

[telkoth]

you're amazing! I'll put this in ASAP (though right now, I'm still at work - shhh )

[Dansmithers]

You made a typo there.