Eat Food Action
The basic coding for the eat food action has been completed. The scenarios involve eating food from home, eating food from a public building and starving. Of course the easiest to test is starving and that looks to be correct. As well, the family birth progress is up and running, so any health gained from eating food will add up to a child birth.
There is an open design question that remains: should there be penalties as well as bonuses? Currently the game works on trying to continuously increase bonuses but as population size grows you require more and more bonus to accomplish the same goals (in this case, get a new child in society). Penalties implies that you could potentially lose progress, or the minimum could be zero, but there would be situations that you have to actively avoid. This might come about if I were to introduce sanitation. On the other hand, I could also introduce sanitation when the population in a land region is above x amount and then bump up the health requirements. In that case, sanitation is a bonus you have to get in order to achieve a health score high enough for a good birth rate.
Art versus Graphics Engine
I generally believe that artwork can make a big difference while an amazing graphics engine is just an interest to technical experts. In that vein, it would mean that special effects and a fantastic engine don't translate to a good game. Instead, what players expect is just a fast FPS and the rest is just the actual artwork. What matters to players is that the artwork looks good; if it's good then it's good. They don't mind that there aren't amazing graphical effects going on.
In that vein I've been experiment with various graphics and colour schemes. Here's an example below. Please note that when the game is release that the artwork will be totally redone, so this is just for example purposes:
So I'll focus on this style of artwork and also I plan to add 2-3 frame style animation for resource collection, fighting and so on.
