In progress right now is the industry management and work orders. Each feature at this point is taking a longer time than previous ones since they are larger pieces. For industry management there are several components before an alpha version is complete:
- Goods Tree Screen
- Labour Dialog, Industrial Structures Dialog and Work Order Dialog
Those UI components are completed and functionality for the work order dialog is also complete. The other component that would be necessary for the alpha version of Cultura is the full functionality of Labour Dialog. Each of these dialogs are different ways to handle industry. Labour dialog allows you to assign a number of people to work in a particular industry to produce as much as they can. It also handles tool selection and non-ideal labour assignments (for the alpha it means people who have a house that is designed for a different type of good and in the future it will also mean people who are not using their best skill). The Industrial Structures dialog allows you to easily upgrade industrial structures and/or view what type of households exist. Each house can have only one type of industrial upgrade (dedicated industrial structures don't exist in the alpha and not likely until you reach neolithic age technology). The work order dialog allows you to order up specific amounts of a good to be collected/crafted using a material selection.
Currently, the work order functionality (you set a work order and then the game automatically begins to assign people to complete the task) is code complete but not fully tested (and debugged and so on). So that'll be finished soon enough. The difficulty in getting this to completion is the rather large number of edge cases and UI design issues that come up. Cultura is a complex game and that means a complex UI. But, ideally the game offers a simple UI to the user but holds easily accessible advanced options for them to micromanage to their heart's content. Additionally, outside of the management UI, there will be a limited number of buttons when units are selected to craft items and possibly other options in the future. Much of the complexity arises from how the code should intelligently react to user input (what should a unit harvest, when should a unit stop, should a unit queue up actions or throw away actions, etc)
Collecting all the tasks together what does Cultura need? Let's ignore UI issues for now. Those will be fleshed out when a feature complete alpha is done (since it's hard to say what might be clunky before actually playing the game).
- Managing Work Orders
- Managing Labour Assignments
- Managing Industrial Structures/Households
- Tracking wealth by household
- Family Spawning/Reproduction
- Random Level Generation for new games
- Data-driven tech tree and goods tree
- Data-driven graphic resource/mesh creation
- Event-driven system
- Graphics component with event-driven system
There are a few open design questions that haven't been fully settled upon:
There might be a UI for seasonally created work orders. For example, it might be "Hunt up to 150 gazelle meat in Summer". This is useful if you don't want to accidentally damage the ecosystem. That currently doesn't exist. There are only work orders and labour assignment.
For now, each household may have any number of bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms and other such residential rooms but only one industrial structure. Estates are composed of different houses, each with up to one industrial room. This is to simplify gameplay and reflect the cottage-style industrial of earlier ancient times.
Reproduction is currently going to be progress based and dependent on health. Poor health leads to slow reproduction rates. After a set amount of time, children become adults. A set amount of time after that they couple with someone else and start a new family. This new family moves out immediately and requires additional housing. Insufficient housing leads to homelessness (I'm unsure whether people can just randomly build houses or whether land property is controlled). I'm also unsure if I wish to implement cultural rules (such as a daughter moves into the son's estate). I'm also unsure of how to do estate spawning or estate joining. For example, let's say a son grows up and then gets married. Does he build his house in his family estate and combined his labour with that of his extended family or does he break off and start a new estate? Estates share the fruits of their labour but not personal property.
I'm still open as to the random level design. Mostly I gravitate towards having a balanced world where each land region is of a specific type and that type determines the kind of resources it may contain but is "balanced". For example, all land regions have 5 common resources and 2 rare resources. Additionally, I'll design the goods tree to be balanced. Each type of good leads to an equal number of industries except precious metal and precious stone which lead to extra industries (and thus drives up their value in a soft manner).
Lastly, my current set of "raw item categories" is: grain, fruit/vegetable, dairy, meat, wood, stone, earth, fur/skin, fibre, filler, bone, herb, precious metal, precious stone. Each has 4 mundane and 4 fantasy style goods. Steampunk theme means they may encounter either resource. Eventually I'd like to rank the material types by rarity. An item's appearance is determined by the most rare material used in its construction. I'd like that more rare materials give a greater bonus when used. The resources are paleolithic themed and that is why there aren't apples, pears or strawberries. Although I'm not clear on whether strawberries existed back then, it got rather difficult to be too authentic so the following list is only somewhat accurate to stone age:
- Grain: wheat, oats, rye, barley, stone grass, green brome, silk rye, bluestem
- Fruit/Vegetable: juniper berries, radish, dates, almonds, glowing mushroom, blue leek, yellow berry, tiger nut
- Dairy: none for now
- Meat: gazelle, seal, mammoth, sabertooth cat, unicorn, ice crab, dragon, direwolf
- Stone: granite, limestone, flint, chert, stonewood, rune rock, aquaferra, dark granite
- Wood: pine, oak, cypress, sycamore, silverleaf, ironwood, amberbark, goldwood
- Earth: clay, sand, kaolin, silt, bright clay, dark shale, fire sand, frost silt
- Metal: tin, iron, nickel, zinc, viper stone, cold iron, frost ore, amber nickel
- Bone: gazelle, seal, mammoth, sabertooth cat, unicorn, ice crab, dragon, direwolf
- Fur/Skin: gazelle, seal, mammoth, sabertooth cat, unicorn, ice crab, dragon, direwolf
- Fibre: silk, cotton, ramie, hemp, giant spider silk, thread mushroom, rock string, yarn bush
- Filler: papyrus, ryegrass, leadtree, burclover, hollow weed, elf blade, grey shrub, goldclover
- Herb: tea, ginger, basil, cinnamon, glowing nettle, ember flowers, comfrey root, mandrake
- Precious Metal: gold, silver, copper, platinum, mithril, adamantium, snow silver, null iron
- Precious Stone: turquoise, diamond, jade, sapphire, mana crystal, moonstone, sky pearl, power stone
