#citysim

TL;DR - We’ve been play testing and iterating a lot this week, crushed a whole nest of bugs, added gameplay enhancing UX features, and you can play soon.

This Week

We made a lot of headway this week - as will always be the case from here on out, we started off the week with a full play through. With multiplayer, the current play time is around an hour, which is great for such a small amount of content. It’s obviously not perfect, but it was super helpful in bringing together a big list of useful fixes and features that were inspired by ACTUALLY PLAYING! Below is a list of these types of fixes that we tackled this week. I know its a bit in-depth, but pretty soon when you all can play, these kinds of lists will be a lot more relevant. In a few weeks, we will have our online development hub community set up, and we’ll start opening up the development - play sessions multiple times a week, discussion forum for everyone’s ideas and questions, and of course, bug reporting.

Previews

Construction

Quit Job on Clickaway brought back

Farms

Die from hunger

Rebalanced hunger/food intake

Bugs

Pink Material Bug Fixed

Underground Spawning Bug Fixed

Hover On Destroyed Bug Fixed

Attack Bug Fixed

Direct Command While In Combat Bug

Building menu / aspect ratio issues fixed

Construction/Settlement Capture

Destroyed building light on fire and are rebuildable

Settlements don’t get destroyed, they get captured and the town is ceded to the aggressing player

Construction is a 1-off task now

Permanently assign builders to town center to automate construction

Hunger bar on characters

Next Week

This next week has a lot more important gameplay features in store. The primary goal for us right now is getting this thing to a playable core - once we have that, you can play, hang out with us in Avalon, and we can collectively move this project forward! Specifically this to-do-before-opendev list is as follows:

Chat

Talk to everyone!

Notifications for attention-needing Avalonians

Starving

New Avalonian

Attacked

Out of Resource

Selection helpers

Select all idle

Select workers at a building

Idle Actions

Walking around town

Defense and town capture balancing

Archer towers

Stronger buildings

Incremental Warfare (destroy archer towers and farms before town capture is feasible by balancing combat numbers)

Fix latency issues when scrolling medium-large distances

This week we are aiming to tackle mostly everything except the defense balancing. If we have time we may get some of that done as well. We’re scheduled to get some tech-talk-time with Improbable this week to work out the latency-fixing-strategy. 

We’re getting super excited about inviting everyone into the development process SUPER SOON - I know it’s hard to wait, but hang in there - we’ll be playing together soon enough!

See you next week!

You didn’t think we’d leave you without a new picture!?

For the ones interested in how the generator works.

The algorithm works as follows:

Horizontal Roads

First horzizontal roads are generated with a random spacing of 1-4 spaces.

Vertical Roads

Vertical roads are generated with a random spacing of 2-6 spaces.

Houses

Each complete block (spaces capsuled by roads), will have a 60% chance of becoming a house block, which means it will be completely filled with houses.

Businesses

The remaining spaces will all be filled with businesses. Each business type has it's own chance of spawning. This means some business types will probably be spawned much more often than others. There is also a little check where the generator makes sure waterside businesses only spawn next to water (Harbors, Fishing Companies, etc.)

Empty lots

Each generated lot has a 25% chance of being an empty one.

Standard Harbor and Airport

Since some businesses cannot function without importing goods, an airport and harbor will be neccesary at the beginning, even though technically they could go bankrupt at some point.