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[dennislp3]

Does the game come with Bagels? I am ok with this

[BlindKitty]

This is not a game, it's a sandwich.

[hops]

nom nom nom ziggurats nom

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

DELICIOUS, ISN'T IT? I was chuffed (even if this is on a rehosting site which doesn't exactly have my permission...)

Anyhoo, working (whilst at a Canadian game studies conference) on this week's update which will be a pretty sizable one, I hope. More on districts, shops, special buildings, other such goodness...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

A fortnight has passed since the last update, marking the first time in quite a while that I didn’t update every week. I’m pleased to say all this travelling is now over and we’ll be sticking with the weekly updates from here until the end of time (or the end of the game, whichever comes first). I haven’t had time to code much this past fortnight but today I’ll be showing off a little more about city districts, talking a bit about special buildings, showing off how markets are currently looking (though there is a long way to go), shop signs (another example of trying to convey as much as possible visually, not verbally), and lastly the Powerpoint slides from my talk at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference I’ve just returned from. So, without further ado:

Housing Districts: I’ve worked on the standard building distribution for middle-class housing districts. Much like lower-class housing districts (and every other) these will be populated with special buildings as well, which I’ll talk a bit about below, but these are the standard looks for this kind of district. Compared to their lower-class brethren, I wanted to make some pretty obvious changes to the algorithm here – more roads and a clearer road system, larger buildings, fewer connected buildings, some more open spaces (especially near main roads), and more trees. I’m now working on deciding what rare buildings should spawn in these areas, and I’m hoping to finish the districts I’m working on currently before moving onto any others, though I confess working on docks generation – especially given its future link to sea travel – is rather exciting too.



I’ve also begun integrating rivers into city districts, which is proving to be an interesting challenge. In some cases it needs to account for where a river is coming through in order to move the doorways between districts; the gates between each sector can be placed in the middle of a wall or on the left/right side (or the top/bottom if a vertical side) and if there’s a river, the river has to take priority. Here are two examples of rivers; as you can see, the in the top picture it needs to figure out how to place bridges intelligently, which I’ll get on to dealing with soon, though the bottom picture works quite nicely. More on this once I’ve got rivers sorted.



Special Buildings: Housing districts will contain a range of other buildings. Lower-class housing districts, for example, may contain prisons, asylums, sewage works, arenas (if the civilization supports gladiatorial combat), slave quarters (if the civilization keeps slaves), etc. I’m not sure yet what middle-class districts will have, but I’m working on it. Maybe things like theaters, opera houses etc, might be fun if I can think of some clear gameplay value for them and integration with the rest of the game. Rarely a district will have one massive special building – the world’s largest prison, or asylum, for example – which will have significant representation in the world’s history and other information. Next week I should be able to show off both the normal-sized special buildings, and some of the larger, unique ones too (which will not spawn every game).

Markets (early version): One of the next districts I want to work on is the market district. Each city will only have one of these (and will be tied to the strategy layer in a way I’ll talk about some other time), and consists of a range of different things. It firstly places various shops along the main paths through the district – these may be any one of currently thirty-two different types of shop, ranging from a helmet shop to a cartographer, from a gunpowder shop to a botanist, and from an antiques shop to a general store. Some of these shops will also be closed or abandoned, and as time passes in the game other shops may open and some may close. I am still working out (in my head) the exact mechanics that I want to use in terms of shop stocks, restocking (or not), etc, but I think I have a good idea of how this is going to look. It then places some market squares where there will be several shops in the centre, in this case heavily biased towards general stores and certain other kinds of common, useful shop (but again, some may be closed). I’ve had a few very interesting ideas from people about what else I could include in market districts (since you can only have so many shops!) and these will include warehouses with large stockpiles locked away, currency exchange buildings, auction houses (still working on how exactly these function), and possibly guilds in the future if I decide to add them as another form of “faction” one can align to, along with religions and cults. So, in the picture below you can see the shops spread out along the main path through the area and the start of a market square in the bottom-right; next I’ll be adding the shops to the square and then adding the other buildings listed above, and should have a finished market district to show next time.



Shop Signs: Shops have signs next to their doors to show you what kind of shop they are. These are all depicted with shapes and symbols instead of words (though I confess, the antiques shop is depicted by an ‘A’ symbol). I haven’t yet finished varying the metal part of the sign, but here’s a decent impression of how the signs are looking. The shape of a shop sign is dependent on the civilization and the wood types are connected to what forms of wood grow in that area (so you won’t get taiga-only trees being used for shop signs in a desert, etc). There are currently thirty-two different shop signs, and I may have another seven or eight planned depending on how exactly I decide to distribute information and items between the different shop types.



CGSA Talk: One of the reasons I managed very little coding this last fortnight was due to travelling to Toronto for the Canadian Game Studies Association conference. This was fantastic – and some people even knew me as the URR person, which blew my mind – and I gave a talk I mentioned in a previous post about the semiotics of roguelikes. I still intend to write this up into a full paper, possibly with a shorter-than-full-paper-but-longer-than-abstract version in the middle, but here’s the presentation slides I used for it. I’m afraid I never write notes for my presentations, but I think you can broadly guess what I was talking about from the context on the slides. Enjoy, and feel free to drop any questions in the comments! The last set of feedback was really useful and helped me correct a few mistakes and focus the talk a bit more. Disclaimer: a small number of colours for a small number of monsters were changed just for ease of viewing on a projector screen. FORGIVE ME, INTERNET. Download it:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/?wpdmact=process&did=NDMuaG90bGluaw==
 
Next week I will either be talking about city districts some more – probably with a focus on way more special buildings, and maybe finishing off market districts – or hunter-gatherer settlements, since I’ve done the initial stages of generating those but have yet to actually implement it fully, so we’ll see how that goes. Until next time!

[Zireael]

Posting to read the slides later.

[Dutchling]

Nice update, as always.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Posting to read the slides later.

Feel free to shoot with any questions - as I say, I think they're clear without my comments, but one or two slides might be a little obtuse without.

Nice update, as always.

Much obliged .

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

A short update this week – although I’ve returned from Canada and have no intention of going to any other seven-hour jetlag conferences ever again in the near future, it’s taking me a little bit to get back into the swing of coding once more (and I’ve had a lot of doctorate correspondence and the like to catch up on). So this week we just have a few small updates on a few things, and hopefully next week a much larger one again. I think a fair estimate for this release is towards the end of July or the start of August – it is going to take slightly longer than 0.5, but that’s due both to all the travel of the last few months and this being the final start of my doctorate, but it’ll be worth it. Walking around cities even in their early form now gives an impressive sense of the scope and size of the game-world.

Settlement Patterns

I’ve started early drafting work on hunter-gatherer settlements. They all appear as ritualized patterns of building-placement – you might get one which looks like a spiral, as the one below, or any one of several dozen other shapes (which themselves vary between playthroughs, but broadly confirm to a preset archetype). Each will contain some crucial buildings such as a town hall, housing for their chieftain and a shrine (if their religion has outside worship), and then various others like forms of burial (pyres, crypts, graves, excarnation platforms, etc), later probably some enclosures for animals, etc. They have no “shops” as such – those who trade are simply individuals who will do so from their own homes. I’m still deciding if all hunter-gatherer civilizations will have a barter system, or have their own forms of currency (shells, certain types of pebbles, etc) they use instead. I think a mix could be interesting, but we’ll see. Each also has a different form of building construction – some use mud bricks, some wattle and daub, some blocks of ice (if located in tundra), some use thatch, some use stone, and so on. Here’s an example of one possible layout, though so far lacking much detail beyond just standard buildings and one or two special ones near the core:



One thing I struggled with what a distinct thematic role for them compared to cities, towns and nomadic fortresses. I’ve now settled on something I’ll talk about in more detail in a later entry, but it focuses on the historical myths and legends of the world, and giving out particular kinds of information that might only be available from them. As with all other settlements, of course, they will be connected to the world histories – if a historical entry mentions a great cavern beneath the settlement, that cavern will indeed be there…

District Buildings

I’ve started to add special buildings to city districts. This is just a very early example but should give a decent impression. This is a lower-class housing district which has had a prison, an asylum, a graveyard and some slave quarters spawned in it. Naturally each will have a huge number of designs (with some randomized aspects within those designs), and these designs are just a placeholder, but you get the idea. As mentioned before there will also be some rare, unique, larger special buildings that take up the entire district and are world-renowned (“the world’s greatest prison”, etc), which I hope to show off soon. Although I haven’t yet begun work on them, I’ve figured out how I’m going to get upper-class housing districts to spawn, and I have some ideas for docks and making appropriate room for ships to appear and dock in later releases, so I might work on those in the near future.



Development Plan

I’ve updated the development plan (http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/development-plan-2/). I’ve been thinking for some time about the correct order to do the four releases after this one, and I have settled on what is undoubtedly the most logical sequence based on the dependencies each may have with the other. The next release will focus on building interiors and redoing the interior saving/loading system to make it far more efficient (part of the gradual efficiency-improvement of the overall game as talked about last week); then I’ll be adding NPCs, and then moving onto a release I’m particularly excited about which was basically heavily focus on the strategy layer of the game – currencies, movement on the world map, etc. Depending on how long the NPC release takes (it might be much easier than expected) those might be combined into one. After that, we’ll be onto generating weapons and armour and various other items, and implementing combat for the first time. Dev plan:

CROPS!!!!

On one of my first and most-jetlagged days back I didn’t feel up to any coding, so I threw together the procedural graphics for most of the crops that can show up on farms, and also added fruit to fruit trees. THIS IS CRUCIAL.



Concluding Thoughts

So, things are moving once more, and hopefully will pick up a little bit more speed from here on in. I’m balancing my coding at the moment between settlements and city districts, so it could be either of those next week, or something totally different. From now on I’m not really going to try to predict what I’ll post on next week because, as time and experience has shown us, I basically never get it right.

[Retropunch]

I know I say this every time, but that looks awwwwwesome. With special buildings in it looks like a proper, living city. I'd thoroughly recommend putting in loads more small features if you get time, like broken down houses, bonfires and other small aesthetics.

I have to confess though, I do have a worry. I've tried to hold back from mentioning it, and I feel like it's a sin of which the gods of proceduralism will strike me down with a procedurally textured lightning bolt:
There might be too much stuff. I just mean this in that I'm assuming you're going to have each building be enter-able/usable, and even the most tenacious explorer might find that they're way too much stuff to look in. In the lower class housing picture you've got over 200 houses, and I'm assuming only 5-10 of those would be of real use to the player.

One way round this might be to have the inside of cities without a fog-of-war (for want of the real term) and have the useful buildings (shops and such) very well highlighted, with a rule being that non-useful houses will have nothing in them. By this rule I just mean that even if the player finds one coin in a box, they'll then smash every box to find more - I feel it'd work very much the same here, if you had one mundane house with something useful in (that wasn't just flavor) the player would be tempted to go through every house.

It's a tricky one, and something I hate to say, but I do feel it needs to be addressed otherwise it'd be just wayyyy too much work for the player.
 

[Dutchling]

That or add, you know, law enforcement?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I know I say this every time, but that looks awwwwwesome. With special buildings in it looks like a proper, living city. I'd thoroughly recommend putting in loads more small features if you get time, like broken down houses, bonfires and other small aesthetics.

I have to confess though, I do have a worry. I've tried to hold back from mentioning it, and I feel like it's a sin of which the gods of proceduralism will strike me down with a procedurally textured lightning bolt:
There might be too much stuff. I just mean this in that I'm assuming you're going to have each building be enter-able/usable, and even the most tenacious explorer might find that they're way too much stuff to look in. In the lower class housing picture you've got over 200 houses, and I'm assuming only 5-10 of those would be of real use to the player.

One way round this might be to have the inside of cities without a fog-of-war (for want of the real term) and have the useful buildings (shops and such) very well highlighted, with a rule being that non-useful houses will have nothing in them. By this rule I just mean that even if the player finds one coin in a box, they'll then smash every box to find more - I feel it'd work very much the same here, if you had one mundane house with something useful in (that wasn't just flavor) the player would be tempted to go through every house.

It's a tricky one, and something I hate to say, but I do feel it needs to be addressed otherwise it'd be just wayyyy too much work for the player.

Thanks! So glad you like it . As for your very amusing query, I actually already have a full solution in place consisting of several components:

Firstly, you will require a key for any house - there will be no way to pass through doors without keys.
Secondly, different districts cost different amounts at customs houses to enter. Thus, you cannot infinitely go around a city - one aspect of the strategic layer of the game will be planning your path through a new city you've just reached based on what parts you want/need to visit, how much of that civ's currency you have, etc.
Thirdly, since the non-food-clock (which I'll talk about some other time) will keep you moving forward like most roguelikes, you can't revisit and endlessly wander around cities. You will need to make decisions, as above, about what to visit, when to visit it, etc. I find something actually very compelling and exciting about the idea of a procedurally generated world that is of such a size you cannot visit it all in one playthrough. There will always be nations unseen, houses unvisited! Some of these houses might hide black markets, or cults, or access to sewers or underground areas, or whatever else, but most of them won't, and they can anyway only be entered with the specific keys. And that nation will never generate again, even though you never got to see it. I think that will lend a real feeling of weight to your decisions, of discovery when you do find yourself somewhere new, and just the overall thematic feeling I'm going for - that of a world great in size, but also one very detailed and dense, and largely unknown, and that you simply cannot uncover it all in one playthrough.

The combination of those three means you simply can't toddle around a city visiting everything, but rather what you choose to visit will be much more focused towards your in-game objectives. It's an unusual system, I recognize this, but I think the kind of decision-making will work amazingly well whilst still keeping the feeling of a huge and expansive and interconnected world. Even if you just wanted to get every key for even a single district, you wouldn't have time. There's a huge amount "hidden" behind closed doors in each district, and it'll be up to the player to choose which bits are worth going after.

That or add, you know, law enforcement?

Ha! This also.

[Retropunch]

EXTREMELY INTERESTING THINGS
Ha! This also.

That does sound very interesting, and I too love the idea of not being able to see everything in one play-through, especially when there is such a rich history with each faction/cult/nation. However, I'm still trying to understand how it works - lets say you have 200 houses on your screen (like the lower class district one) - you can't have keys for all the houses, so I'm guessing some will just be permanently locked? Where do you find these keys? Will the houses that you have keys for show up on the screen in a different color/have indicators?

Sorry for the stream of questions, I just can't imagine how to deal with navigating 200 or so houses!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

EXTREMELY INTERESTING THINGS
Ha! This also.

That does sound very interesting, and I too love the idea of not being able to see everything in one play-through, especially when there is such a rich history with each faction/cult/nation. However, I'm still trying to understand how it works - lets say you have 200 houses on your screen (like the lower class district one) - you can't have keys for all the houses, so I'm guessing some will just be permanently locked? Where do you find these keys? Will the houses that you have keys for show up on the screen in a different color/have indicators?

Sorry for the stream of questions, I just can't imagine how to deal with navigating 200 or so houses!

Excellent! Keys will be found from various places, but generally from individuals; if only a couple of those houses have special items, say, or a route to an underground black market, or similar, those keys will be much easier (but still not "easy") to locate and acquire. No, for keys, it won't immediately tell you what the key is for unless you actually know (so you get it from someone who says "This is the key for ___"). It has always bugged me in games how you instantly magically know what a key is for - instead you'll have to figure out by various contextual clues, but if you *do* know what the key is, I don't dislike the highlighting idea. That might be workable! I want to strike a balance between ease of use and not magically knowing the key's origin, but I think I have it worked out. Keysmiths, in lower-class housing districts and slums, will be very useful in this regard, if you can afford their prices . Do, of course, bear in mind this is just one district in the picture, not the entire city - a city will have thousands of houses, and whilst they WILL all have keys, you'll only ever come across a few, and if you were to just start stabbing everyone for their keys, it might not end well. I... think that answers your questions, but let me know if it doesn't. I like fielding any queries, it's very nice that you're interested in the project!

In other news, yesterday the roads in URR turned to lava and farms ceased to have crops. It was basically the apocalypse, but IT HAS NOW BEEN FIXED.

[Retropunch]

In other news, yesterday the roads in URR turned to lava and farms ceased to have crops. It was basically the apocalypse, but IT HAS NOW BEEN FIXED.

ALL HAIL THE ROADS OF LAVA, FROM STONE TO FIRE, FROM STONE TO FIRE!
(please include a reference to lava roads in your cult creation!)

I guess it does answer my question and does sound very exciting (see: heavy convulsions of excitement) but I still just can't imagine how it could be manageable and not a bit of a grind fest of checking loads of houses.

For instance, if you've got 200 or so houses per area, and without specific guidance (which might mean highlighting) I can imagine it being a bit of a slog just trying loads of random houses, even with some rough directions (and I can't imagine how to do really good ones with procedurally generated terrain/features). Similarly, having loads of houses that you could potentially enter which might have great stuff in (but which you don't have keys for) might grate a bit on some players.

I completely agree that magic location isn't great, but perhaps the houses (or doors) you have keys for could glow/highlight when you're near? I just think that with so many houses/buildings and such a deep history/atmosphere, you don't want the main part of the game to be 'hunt the house'.