Resources and More!

The world of Cultura has been going on and I've been finishing up the xml loading portion of the game. Right now I've just finished what one of my friends call "jack-testing" (ie. it compiles) of the last piece of the xml loading; modular-izing the material selection window between the goods crafting UI and the building construction UI. Yaaay! In any case this brings me to a point where game design matters before continuing any further so I thought I'd consolidate the game for alpha at this point.

Here's what I'd like to have: 14 raw resources, 17 consumable goods, 7 property type goods, 4 super property goods, 5 residential structures, 3 industrial structures, 3 tools, 3 weapons, 3 armour. Of course, all the gameplay and dev-style UI to go with all these features. By the end of the alpha I'd like to have random level generation, fully fleshed out tech tree and wealth management UI (dev-style UI is fine).

Suffice to say, I like economics and I like playing games surrounding them. What I like most is being able to get a visual reward out of it. The core of Cultura is about building stuff, using the stuff and piling that stuff up into giganticus stacks of hoarding. This is why I like seeing new games on the horizon like Clockwork Empires. In any case, industry chains and goods piling? Mmm.

The exact idea is like this: Cultura is about building stuff and using that stuff to expand the number of people you can support. More people means more labour and more military manpower. Over-extending (by not watching your health/happiness) brings about negative consequences worse than the positive aspects of increased population. So the basic distillation of the game is: Harvest Resources -> Create/Trade Goods -> Consume Goods -> Expand.

As said before I like stockpiling good stuff so I invented the concept of "super-property" which for now is built off of two raw resources: precious metal and precious stone. These types of goods last forever, require no repair and give cumulative bonus. Everything else should be streamlined for consumption (rather than risk bottlenecks and pile up of useless goods). I might toy a bit with consumption rates and property use to allow cumulative bonus. It all depends on what is more fun with more tweaking. That aspect of game design can be left open.

Only the property type goods require an intermediate good to produce. This isn't always going to be the case but for the alpha goods it will be. I don't think I'll make a final decision on the exact material types and for now they will all be equal in value. The health/happiness system has yet to be worked out entirely but I can forge ahead with everything else and leave code stubs for those calculations. In essence, I want a way to encourage players to have a variety of goods. For instance, if you want pottery you could get blue clay pottery or red clay pottery. You can store up to 5 pottery in a display room. If you display a greater variety of different pottery the bonus is greater than showing the same pottery. But with the possibility of blue clay pottery, blue/red clay pottery, red clay pottery... what is the bonus of using blue clay, blue clay, blue/red clay versus blue clay, red clay, blue/red clay? In the latter case, you already have pottery that uses red clay but not a purely red clay pottery... however items with more materials in them give more value. I might calculate bonus based off of "sum of item level" and then a second additional bonus of "materials used"

I'll compile a list of exactly what goods will be in the game design wise but leave what they actually are open. That is I'll say I need a Bone Consumable Good but it could be "bonemeal". I'm leaving that open since I have no graphics yet and the Stone Age theme requires a bit of resource to see what exactly people back then had. I'll also leave out tech-themed goods until the beta (Mundane, Steampunk and Fantasy). But in general, the Mundane gets the advantage of being able to build more types of goods (and thus receive more health/happiness as a result) to compete with the advantages of magic (Fantasy) or advanced machinery (Steampunk).