Four Focuses

Work has been done, the latest aspect is property items. These kinds of items are stuff you stick into slots in a family's home and then they enjoy health/happiness bonus from it (spread evenly to every member in the family). That's on-going. Another on-going aspect is the graphics engine. Needless to say, a game needs a good graphics engine to be graphically nice. There's some technical thoughts on that but until it comes to fruition, it will be written about in later posts.

But, what of Cultura as a game? The total game design is coming along and let me take you along that journey. For a game as broad as Cultura, one problem is trying to bring it back together into a neat little box of designed fun. You want the game to be wide open, sandboxy and capable of creating unexpected situations. The emergent aspects. On the other hand you want it to be understandable at a glance, to have a low barrier to playing it so that you can say, I'm going to play for an hour and I can just dive right back into the game.

The whole of Cultura has been split into four neatly laid out focuses in the game that explore the whole of the setting that is displayed to you in all its glory.

Ecology and nature is the most apparent. You start off in an open world with different trees, plants and animals out there. Some you can eat, others you use for producing luxury goods. One of the big concerns in Cultura is the "carrying capacity" of the land. Trees grow, animals are born but at a rate determined by different factors. For Cultura, these factors are simplified. Until there's a "realistic mode", the simulation model is fairly simple so that a player can understand it quickly and adjust to meet social needs for short and long term goals. Forests grow based on the number of still standing trees. Most plants grow just the same, based on the number that exist. Animals grow based on the number of animals but the herd starts starving if it runs low on the number of plants in the wild. So maybe you think you're harvesting "glowing nettle" and it's fine, until you realise you're starving out the local deer of their food source and the herd dies out.

It'll be prominent and direct. The interface will show you each land region. Each land region lists the resources available in it. It shows you the rate at which they grow and what affects the growth rates. Then it's up to the player to decide how to handle that.

As the name would imply, Cultura revolves around culture and that's the biggest core focus as you play. Technology and cultural traits are thrown together like a bunch of miniature skill trees for you to pick and choose to develop the aesthetic feel of your society and also the play style. Most of the technology revolves around improving your industry (industrial buildings, tools, lifting resource extraction limitations), expanding your repertoire of goods you can manufacture (choosing between goods built from each kind of resource, or different high level goods, to build a particular aesthetic feel to the kind of luxuries your society makes), expanding your ability to consume (more or better structures to build), government policies (different ways of performing taxation and also ruling over a larger empire). Cultural traits revolve around social values to adhere to a particular play style. Choosing values that favour war and military, being able to hold Roman-style triumphs, would benefit an aggressive player who wants to gain happiness bonuses from going to war. Or you can choose a pacifist route where you can agree to unfavourable peace treaties yet still gain happiness in your society because your people abhor war so much.

Technology is very specific and the cultural traits you choose are very specific. They allow you to shape your society however you see fit. A militant raider society that produces wood carvings and yarn dolls. A trading society that produces stone axe heads and stone-tipped arrows. It's really what Cultura is all about.

Then there is industry. Handling your resource extraction and manufacturing. The focus is on how much resources you consume, how many goods you produce and whether your goods production matches your population's consumption. You can shore up missing goods through trade. You can over-produce specifically to sell the goods to others. The focus is on setting up new industries, expanding current ones and managing labour distribution. You can have seasonal industries (hunting after an animal herd's growth period). For the first iteration of Cultura, it's about making things for your people and trading the excess to others for things you don't have.

Finally there is diplomacy. This is the most emergent aspect of the game. Are you surrounded by aggressive barbarians? Is there perhaps a trading empire close by? Maybe there's a lot of weaker societies but each of them are more adept than yours at producing particular sets of goods. You interact with them for trade, treaties or war. Trading and raiding are the two most important interactions with other societies to gain goods you cannot produce or do not have enough of, and your choices depend on the total interaction within the world.

Diplomacy and trade are combined and they occur along trade routes. Convoys move back and forth between societies to deliver diplomatic messages, treaty proposals, trade agreements or just the goods you already agreed to trade. But, of course, you can always choose to forgo such polite diplomacy and opt for raiding and as your society becomes more advanced, waging war!

This is a lot more focused version of what Cultura will be about and it gives players a more clear-minded way to approach the game. It leaves the sandbox nature there (you can choose to interact with nature and people however you wish) but displayed in a clear way. Imagine, you have a land rich in iron but low in wood. A neighbour is rich in forests. Do you raid them for their wood using your superior metal-based weapons? But then others might see you as aggressive and refuse to trade with you and you haven't the military to attack them all. They provide valuable goods like wine and fruit juices to maintain your empire's health. You make your choices and live with the consequences.