In all seriousness, you are promising a lot and I hope you deliver. You've made good progress, and there are many active people ready to bully you into finishing this game, so I hope you will.
I am promising a lot. There's no doubt about that. And it's weird, because no matter how much I say "I will deliver!", it cannot actually GUARANTEE to anyone else that I will deliver. All I can say is that I have no intention of stopping any time in the next decade, so make of that what you will
Do you know about a podcast called roguelike radio? A while ago they made an episode about designing for the visually impaired. Here's the episode with some worthwhile links included. It's not a personal problem for me but I figured that it would be easier for you to include this in your design decisions while still in alpha. That is, if you choose to design for people with less than five full senses.
Glad to see this project going forward, still following with interest.
I do, and it's an interesting question. I've added Dvorak support, but I could definitely try to adjust colour options. I hadn't really thought about it, but now I am. In some later version (it won't be that hard to add in retrospectively, I don't... think?) I may just give it a shot.
I'd be sincerely happy with it as long as you can talk to be people and they'll talk about their civ, culture and things like that. I'd consider it playable in an alpha level.
NPCS IN THE NEXT VERSION?! Steady on
Also, yeah, for a a suggestion, you should have weather not only dictate things like "spicyness" of the food, but also what kind of food a civilization bases itself of. Tropical areas should have either Sweet Potato, Manioc, Corn, Black Beans, areas that are far from Europe but are temperate should have Rice, large plains should have well developed ranching and knowledge in meat preservation.
Also, thinking of that, if you could make a trase system based on a realistic supply and demand system it would be grand, think like, a city has 1000 people, those people need X amounts of food to survive, and they consume X units everyday, if weather conditions alter crop development and all of that, you could even have famines or so.
That's a great idea re: food types. In terms of cities and things requiring food, I fully intend to have a system like that. Not enough food means starvation, food stockpiles can be created, weather conditions affect crops, etc etc. Some of these mechanics will be abstracted out for history generation (which is to say, there will be famines, but the mechanics behind them will be far less intricate), but once you reach the gameplay era, the mechanics will be fully present.
Will land affect that kind of stuff? Will isolated people develop less weapons/be less warlike?(More likely the former)
Yeeeeees... within limits. Isolated groups will, I think, be less likely to pursue weapons technology. I'm still considering the tech tree (though it's looking good at the moment - will post a photo at some point) and some parts of it are strongly influenced by your surroundings.
This game looks really promising, I can't wait to see the final version of it ! I really hope you'll "finish" it ( if a game of this scale can ever be finished ) . URR, I wonder, do you know any other language than Python ? If so, why did you pick Python and how much time did you take to learn it ? I am actually quite interested in programming and I tried learning C++, but well yeah it's kind of hard and I wonder if it would be a better idea to learn something a little bit simpler to begin with.
Anyway, good luck with your project !
Thanks - as I said, I have at least a decade of work in me yet! I do not; I knew no programming language before Python, and URR is the first programming project I've ever undertaken. I picked Python because it had a nice roguelike tutorial, basically. It took me a month or so to get to grips with the basics, then four/six months of improving, and now I am still improving, but slowly. That four/six months had a lot of re-writing old, terrible code, as I learnt better ways to get the same results. I think Python is really good because it's very clear, very explicit in how its functions work, and - let's not forget - has a roguelike tutorial
I love the look of those trees. I'm waiting for this to get a bit further along before taking the plunge.
Thanks
- and not a bad move. Next version has myth/history/language generation, then the version after that has ruins and dungeons and the earliest "gameplay" aspects. Although... whisper it... I might end up combining those two coming versions...
I stand corrected, then.
I always learn something new in this thread...
Meanwhile, here's a work-in-progress screenshot of territories at "Year 0", ie. the start of history generation:
Full size :
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/files/2012/12/Valid3.png