Alpha Time

As Cultura head towards a playable Alpha it's time to lock down some of the game design decisions. What has been influencing the entire process has been a focus on:

• Simplicity: Can the user understand what is happening at a glance?
• Simulation: Is this a reasonable simplification of real life?
• Longevity: What is the future path of this game element and is it fun to keep pursuing it?

That's a sort of rough list of what the factors are in saying whether a game element stays, is changed or is dropped.

UI: I'm leaning towards a "total" rather than location UI. It shows you what you have in total in the top right (just a few of the relevant resources or maybe I can splay the 15 resources across the top). Commands you give are carried out by government employed workers (eventually in a sequel there'll be private market). There may be a secondary advanced layer, which requires one additional click, for tweaking at the building or individual citizen level.

Buildings: There'll be probably just a simple set of five main buildings for residential purposes that allows the consumption of goods (consumable and property). They revolve around how to improve health and happiness. Then there are infrastructure buildings like work sites, roads, irrigation and walls. And then there are industrial buildings like mines and farms (maybe JUST mines and farms). These would pop up in a radial menu... probably by pressing "b" for basic buildings, "v" for industrial buildings, "x" for infrastructure buildings. Then perhaps a hideable bar for the same buttons at the bottom of the screen.

Additionally, buildings are built room by room. Doors are the connection points. You mush rooms together to form larger buildings. Each building can only be owned by one family. Ownership (for now) will be automatic. In the future, I'd like there to be an advanced assignment UI (especially if you are an evil dictator trying to form different classes of citizens, some should get better housing than others).

Goods consumption is facing a few changes at this point. There was the concept of consumable and property, where they were equal in health/happiness benefit. I'm going to change it such that property lasts longer, costs less resources over the long run but has high initial costs. That way consumables and property represent a trade off between short term gain and long term gain.

The environment will be separate from artificial structures (though not entirely realistic). This means there can be wild trees, plants and grasses and they grow, you can harvest them and they will regenerate. Same with animals (they'll run around and you can hunt them). Farms and pastures on the other hand require input (labour, maybe water, perhaps some other stuff) but are upgradeable to produce at a higher rate than nature (thus increasing per tile food productivity).

Consumption is automatic. You give orders to produce goods per industry, work orders for a specific amount of a particular good. This UI would be simplified so that you just give one general order for your whole society. I'd like it to be more advanced but that may make the UI too cluttered and I don't have a good solution to that yet.

The world will be designed such that each season represents a consumption of different resources so that there's always something interesting to do (especially during the stone age). As you shift into agrarian (in some future version of this game) it'll change into a more planting/do nothing/harvest rotation and you choose what you might want to do in the "do nothing" phase (like wage war as if you were the Romans).

Interesting diplomatic relations. This is a lot more about making believable AI and on top of that they would give you verbal cues to the rationale behind their actions. That way if they were to do something stupid on purpose, they inform you of this, so that you know. In this way it prevents the "do not dumb here, not dumb area" feeling. Hopefully. Needs some playtesting.