lilsumngames

[lilsumngames]

A Tale of Code and Art - April Dev Update

What’s up everyone! Some exciting stuff is happening with Avalon!

Mostly visual, some code-able - so let’s get into it.

So there we sat after returning to Portland from GDC. All our cash down a way-too-expensive margarita drain. Avalon had just been featured at Improbable’s spot on the expo floor, and we were feeling pretty good. But something bugged us. Quinn and I sat around doing a playtest, trying to build a town bigger and bigger, and really see the massiveness that Avalon promises come out and show itself. But it just wouldn't. The isometric camera never showed any perspective, it was almost literally disallowing the feeling of vastness from entering our screens. It’s interesting to note a lot of games end up suffering from a bad camera choice super early on. That being said, if we changed out of iso, it would be a bit of a stretch to keep any of our current assets, as they were all designed for that mobile-game-esque simplicity. In all honesty, that style was cool, but it just wasn’t what Avalon needed. Avalon needed depth, perspective, distance blur, FOV, bloom, the lot. It needed to present space and distance, it needed to work in a 3d world with real mountains and valleys.

For all these reasons, and also the fact that Richard recently joined our team to start pumping out some quality models, we bring you Avalon’s new look!

Now that’s a look that shows massive, persistent, civilization builder isn’t it?

One major comment here has been that it’s hard to tell which buildings do what. Well, that’s pretty much because none of these buildings do anything and we are still in the process of designing industrial, etc useful buildings to match this new style. Richard is hard at work on that and you can get some daily updates and give him your thoughts in our community dev discord server - https://invite.gg/avalonmmo .

So What About the Code?

Well, as you have probably noticed, the guys in Avalon don’t really use the roads yet. That’s because of a dirty little secret with our current version: we didn’t do pathing yet. Now, you might be thinking, “well, no big deal, throw in some A* and call it a day.” Sadly, in a massive world distributed spatially across multiple computers, that’s just not that simple. Additionally, Avalon doesn’t just have “some” pathing. The entire game is pathing - players could each have upwards fo thousands of villagers - all pathing in a persistent simulation even when players are offline. It’s gotta be efficient, and it’s gotta work across multiple computers. 

We are currently at work building a pathing system to deal with these large issues - when it is ready, Avalon will finally work in a truly distributed deployment, and as such, it can be play tested by lots of people at once.

Okay So What’s the Plan

Here’s the plan. We are gunna use the next month-ish to get this massive pathing thing figured out, drop in the new art style, and get it back in working condition for the first open playtest on an actually large scale. In the meantime, you are gunna head over to our discord where you can get regular updates, share your ideas, and debate with the rest of the Avalon community about how long distance trade networks should be structured ;) https://invite.gg/avalonmmo

You also will need to be part of the discord to playtest - so hope to see you all there soon!

Peace.

[lilsumngames]

Devlog 17

Long time no post! Fear not! We’re alive!

Hey guys - it’s been a crazy couple of month, the teams has been dealing with some other projects that have taken time getting started, additionally we have been working on beefing up our dev team and getting more people to help us make some real progress towards scalability. But additionally, we have actually made a bit of progress during that time!

What’s New

One big thing we got working was object pooling - this is a huge step towards decreasing the latency we’ve been experiencing on live playlists. There’s a LOT of trees, rocks, etc, and they’re all intractable objects, so that takes quite a load on the CPU when creating and destroying object all the time (mainly when scrolling around the world). While this helped, we still have latency issues when scrolling, and we are trying to work with improbable to figure out where to go from here. 

Another big thing is being able to delete buildings! Remember all those annoying placements that you couldn’t undo? well now you can! Not much else to say there, but it really goes a long way when you are building a town :)

We also made it so when you place construction sites, the area is cleared of rocks and trees and the likes - it was super annoying to have a tree growing through your road, so no more of that - looks very sweet.

We made a lot of tweaks to foresters, but they still need work - trying to get the perfect balance of trees surrounding them. One new thing is that they won’t try to plant trees inside other buildings now!

As you can see, a lot of the work we’ve been doing has been polishing up the game as is, not a lot of “new” features, more like making the experience smooth and inviting, rather than confusing.

What’s Next

Well we have a lot of really annoying latency issues that are hindering progress more and more as we go on - once we iron out a few more things, we basically are moving into phase 2 which is multiplayer dynamics (trade and combat). The thing is, we need the lag to be gone to get that working, and as of yet, we haven’t been able to crack spatial in an RTS setting - you scroll around the world so much faster in this type of game than a Survival or FPS game. We’re worried this may be an existential issue, but we hope we’ll have a solution soon.

Those few more things are 

Reworking the construction / territory tiles algorithm to not lag out exponentially as your city grows

Making scrolling not lag

Balancing Foresters

UI Input Interception Bugs

Yeah, it’s a pretty short list, but that second bullet is a huge huge thing.

The end of that list signifies that basically the single player MVP of the game works! We have some pretty fun city building! After that we drop in some trading mechanics and some incremental combat system, and its ready to scale!

Founders!

Hey founders! Everyone who signed up - thank you so much! I know you haven’t gotten an email yet, we are trying to figure out an email system to use with our list, and of course we also haven’t done any play tests since you all signed up. But once we get this lag fixed we will be hitting all of you up to get your accounts and get ready for a big ol’ play test!

[lilsumngames]

Week 16

Welp. The project works again!

What’s Been Going On

So like I said in the last post, over the last two weeks, our team had to upgrade to the newest MacOS, High Sierra. We needed the upgrade for other tools we were using etc etc - whatever. No big deal right? No need to check the unity forum to make sure 5.6.0 wouldn’t break right? Wrong. Project looked corrupted after the update, no assets importing, totally heartbroken.

Basically we figured out the only way to fix it is to partition our drives to preserve the old mac file system on a portion of our hard drives, put the project in there, and do all other manners of hacks to get it to work. Over the past week we’ve been trying to get everything back to a workable pipeline, so we haven’t had much real progress. Luckily, today I finally got the project back to running condition on High Sierra! This means we are back in business! 

So Where Were We

Before this whole meltdown, we had just showcased Avalon at a PIGSquad event, gotten a bunch of play tester sign ups, and a lot of real life user feedback on UI, controls, and gameplay. Among these things were:

Ability to pan by putting your cursor at the edge of the screen

Fixing click-ability of all manner of things

Rotating Buildings for Placement

We’ll work on all this, and for all you who have signed up to be a founder - thank you so much! We will send you all an email soon and start doing founder stuff - just let us get the project back up and running and we’ll reach out ASAP!!

[lilsumngames]

We’re in a bit of a Pickle

Hey guys!

Just wanted to keep everyone updated - we’ve ran into a minor road bump with our tech - Mac High Sierra has caused our version of unity to basically stop working (a version we must be on for spatial compatibility) and we’re currently working out with Improbable how to proceed. After updating to the newest Mac OS, our project’s assets folder was just totally empty, the whole thing looked corrupted, it was scary as hell. After tinkering a lot, and installing multiple versions of Unity, we were getting pretty worried. Once we found this post from the Unity team, we felt a bit more reassured, but we still don’t have a version which A. works on High Sierra and B. works with spatial. We can’t downgrade our OS, so either some serious workarounds will be in order, or we’ll figure something our with Improbable. Shouldn’t be too long before we are back on track and onward to play testing! Until then, sit back, have a tall glass of eggnog, and play some Civ6 or something.

Jake

[lilsumngames]

Devlog coming soon! Sorry for the delay, in the meantime look at this sexy thing.

[lilsumngames]

Week 15

Play Testing

Thats right folks we finally got some external play testing going at the PIGSquad Social last Friday and started to add users to our community. Our main goal for the event was to get some feedback on how fun / wieldy the core loop of solo-city management.

We noticed a lot of issues with lack of information given which we expected, but it really exemplified the need for in-game help or even just a web-based tutorial. However, despite making some simple misinformed mistakes most of our testers were able to balance their town's food supply and played for a lot longer than we expected!

This coming week we are going to be fixing up all of the bugs that people reported and doing some more general clean up before our first live multiplayer test sesh.

Founders

Another exciting thing we are announcing is that the first 100 play testers will become founders! This will give you full access to all Avalon releases for free, full access to our open development community launching soon and future planned in game unique item(s).

The list is growing every day so make sure to request to be added to the list here.

Sooo.. I can play now?

No. But the features are in that we want users to be able to start with. We really want to iron out the problems that we feel truly break the immersion of the game and finish up the perfecting of the core loop.

Soooo....... When can I play?

Join the development community. This will guarantee your spot in line! First session (and however the hell that will go) will be this month.

And for fun a pic of our setup for the Social! 

[lilsumngames]

Hows that for a town :D

[lilsumngames]

Week 14

TL;DR - game dev is crazy, if you aren’t changing your mind you aren’t doing it right - we didn’t work in combat this week - it isn’t the core experience we should be perfecting - instead we focused on the creative aptitude of the sandbox so far.

What About Combat

So when I sat down to work on combat nothing was really working - there’s all these issues with MMORTS that I touched on last week, and yeah we have our solutions, but it turns out we really need to have more of a solid base to throw combat into. The idea of this project was never to focus on combat, but instead on collaborative world building through free trade. In the most simple formulation - it’s an mmo city builder, you can trade. The question becomes what motivates the trade? The answer - some higher tier buildings/objects/etc. so what are those higher tier for? Combat? Maybe. Maybe it’s just things to protect your trade routes? Maybe it’s combat related, but not on the scale of city vs city. The point is, we were jumping the gun to throw combat in now. We could’ve done it, it would’ve made the current 45 min play tests awesome, but it would have fallen apart in a long term persistent world.

To really figure out how these persistent worlds will have to work, we need to make them first - the essentials need to be in place, then we can figure out how to motivate trade. We really knew this before, we have design documents that say it, but we ignored it because we got sucked into play tests on an un-finished idea.

The Rules of Creativity

Anyway - so what did we do this week? We spent time trying to get cooler cities to grow. It might seem weird, but if you just make a game with a forester, quarry, and farm and hook it together how you think it ought to be, the product does not look like a town. Take a look at this picture here

There’s buildings everywhere, stuff growing through the roads, everything is scattered. It has the pieces of a town, but it’s not a town. It’s just a bunch of buildings. Why is this? Generally speaking, it has to do with tuning the city builder’s rules to deliberately constrain players into building town-like things. Exhibit A: if you have a huge building radius and the characters can walk without roads, why do you need roads? Your town quickly becomes just a heap of random buildings. There’s lots of other cool things like this where simply making some restrictions turns this random heap into a town. This week we tackled a lot of them.

Made walls, they snap together and form corners etc

Made guard towers, even though they don’t really work, they look cool

Fixed the margin issues with all the buildings and roads - before everything was flush with each other - this was bad for character pathing as well as general aesthetics.

Tweaked town border expansion rules to encourage realistic road growth

Fixed issues with building placement accuracy

Tuned spawn rates for optimal house-farm ratio

And what did these heaps of buildings look like after all that? Feast your eyes:

We’re going to keep cranking on this as it’s really really improving the gameplay. It seems like meaningless polish but look at those results! If cities are fun to build, effective tools for creativity, then the job is well done. It’s on its way.

I know. You’re still thinking “So… can I play?” I’d say, yet again, almost. The game is fun, it would be fun to throw a bunch of us on one of these big spatial servers and try it out. The issue is lots of small bugs. If you avoid them all, the game plays like a gem. If you don’t, you aren’t going to have much fun. Internally, we can play it easily, since we know every bug, and we know how to avoid them all. Externally, I think of it like this: With sandbox games, you gotta build strong boxes (with no holes) to put the sand in, or as soon as the player sits down the whole thing breaks. That’s where it is. Over the next week or two, we are going to be ironing all this out of it so you actually can play. Sorry for the delay - it’ll be worth it!

In other news if you are in Portland we are going to be showcasing this Friday at the PIGSquad social - so see ya there!

Stay groovy, see you next week!

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #13

TL;DR - This week’s UI updates gave the game a whole new life - using resource trend stats and chat notifications, the current feature set is finally manageable - it’s now fun and challenging to stabilize and expand your population. We’re moving into combat, and have a lot of design to tell you about :D

This Week

This week we pretty much did what we said we were going to do - UI/UX stuff. The game was hard to manage - the mechanics were all there but it was impossible to tell who was doing what, who was starving, who needed a job, etc etc. We had a large list of possible fixes for these issues, but in the end, we didn’t actually need all of them. Below is a list of features we finished this week.

Grouping Help

Select all workers of a building (left click)

Select idle (i)

Construction sites show percentage on enable

Settlement health increased

Selection across the world

District Stats

Resources

Resource trends

Population

Beds

Chat

Colored Usernames

Notifications in chat

With grouping help, chat notifications, and district stats, the towns became much more manageable and even fun to manage. Using the stats, you can analyze your current output, and move small amounts of workers around to maximize production of certain resources over others.

Design Interlude

Before we go into next week’s agenda, it might help to get some background on our thinking. So as many of you know, Avalon is a city-builder / RTS hybrid living in a huge persistent world. As many of you also may happen to know, this is a genre of game that has been theorized for some time now, boasts a slew of failed projects, and even suffers from existential design problems. How could anything go wrong? Create a giant sandbox world where people can build and go to war (imagine RTS style mechanics) - 2 major issues arise:

More frequently online players out-pace and beat less frequent players

New players are easily decimated by veteran players

This is all falling on top of the fact that even RTS in its current form has a mountain of design failings - there are so many degenerate tactics that hold the game back from real organized strategic war in the first place. The reason I’m bringing this up is for anyone doing your homework, I want to lay out our plan to fix these giant issues. Among games who have attempted this there are 2 major camps

Nerf and slow down combat so much that players have time to react even when not frequently online and make some safe zone for new players

Fuck it (These are just hardcore wasteland games with learning curves worse than DF, no complex emergent systems, and huge amounts of required play time)

We aren’t doing either of those things - #1 is boring, #2 is basically not even an answer. We have a small tweak we think can fix it all: cooperation. Take that MMORTS wasteland you were just imagining and change one simple mechanic - players can start towns together / join others towns / form alliances with other towns (nations). So how do our issues above dissolve? For issue #1, in a world where the sides of a potential battle are not single players but large groups of players in many towns, an interesting phenomena occurs. At a certain nation size, the mixture of hardcore, midcore, and software players start to normalize to the same ratio for all nations. This fixes the frequency issue, and given that the marginal utility of total group size is also capped in some simple way (just make groups unwieldy after a certain point) there will be a fairly leveled playing field for all nations. As for issue #2, in an alliance based world, new players would not only be welcomed but begged to join different nations - they offer more player power, more production power, and fill necessary roles in more advanced player’s skill trees. Say advanced players needed lower level resources in mass quantities to fuel their productions - now huge amounts of new players can be supported in the ecosystem. So what about war? With large, equally matched nations, the sandbox stops degenerating to the classic RTS issues. Imagine a real world scenario where two towns existed for the sole purpose of destroying the other - the strategies you see in RTS wouldn’t be so uncommon. Since the Avalon sandbox is emulating a more realistic scenario - the ongoing existence of large allied bodies - war becomes much more realistic. You aren’t going to war to destroy other players, you’re going to war for resources, for strategic reasons. You have huge alliances that could swing in or out of your favor based on your decisions. When alliances do go to war, it’s not over in 15 minutes - there’s many towns in a large world to attack, occupy, stabilize, and integrate into an ongoing nation. With all these added balances, Avalon becomes free of a lot of issues traditionally seen with these games.

Next Week

Our plan this week is to get combat more balanced, stabilized, and less chaotic. Towns need more protection - so we are going to add archer towers. One of the most unwieldy parts of combat is that your entire workforce suits their job to fight right now. By adding trainable melee units and dipping the health of the normal villagers, we are hoping to fix this issue. Melee units will auto attack, villagers will run inside and hide. Melee units stay at a post, villagers wander around. Attacks will be comprised of melee units and defenses will be comprised of archer towers and other melee units - no one will leave their jobs, and the defense has a fighting chance now. This is the last thing we are planning on adding before open development - so I hope you’re getting pumped to start playing!

Weekly ToDo

Repopulation

Purchase new villagers from town center with resources

We are changing this to tend slightly more towards RTS and keep units manageable

Archery - man workers at posts to fire ranged attacks

Sentry Towers

Archery from Town Center

Melee Training

Barracks - uses resources and guys working there slowly train up their melee skill (stars) and you can take them out whenever

These are the only guys that will auto-attack, they can’t be put in normal work sites (you can still attack with villagers, it’s just not auto)

Essentially, these are our first real RTS units

Weekly Fancy Stuff

In other news, we finally dropped some of those new building models in and fixed the lighting and shadows. Below is a before and after of just the lighting changes - pretty sweet huh?

Then we added the new buildings

Then we made construction models for all of that so no ore white boxes on the ground!

See you next week!

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #12

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!?

GIF FTW.

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #11

Happy Sunday once again fellow Avalonians!

The past week has been pretty exciting on multiple fronts. We had Press Over news write a nice blurb about Avalon, and even better - Improbable added Avalon to the featured Games Blog! In response to this, the two of us have been worried about getting a very stable layout for the rest of the game.

Jake and I have been discussing what I like to call the "Juicy Bits". Things such as skill specialization and advancement, building upgrades, even the beginnings of how vehicles and trade will be working!

Heres a sneak peak on how we see food production advancement going:

Gathering

Hunting

Farming for wheat

Mill for wheat -> grain

Orchards

Chicken Coups

Ranches for larger animals

Bakery

Even more!

Nothing is set in stone, but as you can see - we're trying to attack content from all sides. The biggest revelation from this week's sit-down is that we're going to begin building a community to help us hammer out the details that will make Avalon a stable world. There will be more on that later - but heres what happened in terms of development this week.

Worker Spawning - Thats right, workers are getting down and getting funky, and new workers are popping out of houses left and right. 

More UI Work - The ever daunting mound of ui to do is being chipped away, slowly but surely! 

Construction Efficiency - Builders now continue to build until there are no more worksites, allowing roads and more to be built with ease.

We’re working on some upgrades for our current industries!

We have new buildings for foresters and quarries! Check it Out!

More on the juiciness next week!

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #10

HAPPY SUNDAY EVERYONE LET’S TALK NUMBERS

The Code, It Just Feels So Smooth

So I started this week off saying it was time to do some polishing. Polishing though, is actually a nice word for bug fixing. So that’s what we did. After adding some roads to towns, you could really start to shape the your city to your own creative will. But while the light at the end of the tunnel was becoming visible, it was clear we weren’t out yet. Either it was a UI thing or a mechanical bug, but left and right the game had “you need to fix that” type of things. It’s a good place to be - major mechanics are in, we’re actually getting to that point where we can think of what playing it is gunna feel like. Some of the first ever extended play tests happened this week - It was only Quinn and I, but someone actually sat down and said, “Okay, let’s play Avalon.” We weren’t expecting to see something polished, we play this thing every day testing something or other. But we approached it with a different mindset this time: “Enough mechanics are in that it’s fair to ask: How does it play? How can it improve? What’s confusing? What do you wish was there?” And we found a lot. Here’s what we worked on this week.

• AI Actions Overhaul: Actions code was getting out of hand, error handling was everywhere, and stuff like construction bugs and worker bugs just couldn’t be easily fixed without just rethinking actions. Practically, this just means a lot of bugs were fixed at once.

• We Added Roads: They don’t necessarily use the roads, but you can use the roads to expand your town.

• They Need to Eat Now: Yep, the days of free labor are over my friends. You can finally grow your population with housing, and sustain it with agriculture. Throw in the fact that they can be killed or starve to death, and you got yourself the mighty fine workings of a multiplayer game loop! 

• UI Stuffs: This is a lump of cool new UI features that will help everyone know what the hell their peasants are doing. You can check construction progress, building health, character health, and see what a character is doing.

So It’s Almost November, and It’s ALMOST THERE!

As everyone knows, our stage 1 goal is November. That’s in a few days. What do we have left? Really not much. We plan to start doing some closed online testing in the next two weeks. We’d like to add some walls before then, and maybe an archer tower. From there we are going to be continuing this loop of 

Play -> What’s broken, What do we want -> Tweak -> Repeat

It’s all coming together and it’s getting really exciting - so everyone get pumped!

[lilsumngames]

When you're so fed up with your NPCs that you just tell them to get the hell out of town. 

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #9

Districts done, an epic amount of data linking is done with it, paving the way for an easy and quick shot at the few remaining stage 1 features.

Wait What?

So to deconstruct that - remember how we decided to make this district system for character automation? They serve as a proxy for a town, allow people to claim land in a way, and also allow characters to have access to information about the area around them without sending a hurricane of packets to the spatial server. Well basically, while that sounds like just another feature, in a way, a lot of other features can build off of it, using the network of data it makes available to complete lots of jobs like where to find items, how many beds are in a town, and how many people live there. That kind of stuff takes a lot of careful setup, cause if it breaks, a lot of stuff depends on it. So we really nailed that whole feature this week, and towns/districts are working great. We also got the chance to add repopulation. Now, based on your population and available beds, your population can reproduce. This is a big step for avalon - finally giving some primitive form of an incentive to do anything. 

Feature Fury

To cut our week into pie pieces - the district setup took 99% of the time. Repopulation - a really cool feature - took about 1%. A lot of other features follow this kind of pattern - they needed district/automation systems to work properly, and now their boilerplate is in. This week we’re going to attack some of those and also begin making obvious polishing and gameplay changes to start gearing up for a limited test group. Included this week are food, eating, and hunger, roads, possibly walls and archer towers, and a whole host of UI fixes, updates, and polishing. A lot of the game is rough around the edges from weeks of brutal new feature bombardment, and it needs some smoothing out before we can start putting it in players’ hands and getting additional feedback.

So Like, Are You Saying I Can Play Soon?

In a development context, yes. Pretty soon we will be starting really limited play testing sessions, getting mountains of simple, and easy to acquire feedback, rolling that into game-polish, lathering it on, and starting again. Once we get something fairly solid with our smaller group, we want to open that up to a broader audience, and maybe start to build a little dev community where people can begin to report bugs, talk about their concerns/ideas, and most importantly get ready for stage 2/3 playlists - which will be much larger in scale by necessity than stage 1. So everyone who’s interested in that stuff, since the forum isn’t up or anything yet, if you really want to get in on this, just send us an email at lilsumngames@gmail.com (I know, we have a normie gmail) and we’ll let you know when it’s ready!

Bonus

Where’s all the screenshots guys? I know this week was a bit dry - you probably can tell from the features how un-visual they are. Well here’s the bonus - you know how all the buildings look too similar? Well check out this sneak peak.

New buildings on the way, trying to spice up all y’all’s towns-to-be!

[lilsumngames]

Settlement and District-Bound Building System

[lilsumngames]

Devlog #8

Discovering a golden feature is hard, especially when you are building a genre from the ground up, and there’s not a lot to reference.

Basic Weekly Updates

Happy Saturday everyone! We did get stockpiles in, but they kind of opened an unforeseen skill-tree if you know what I mean. To hear more about that issue, head over to the next section. We’ve been working a lot on media-kit type stuff, and doing some art stuff as well - making some moves, trying to ramp up our model production a bit, blah blah. Basically we’re still on track! Now let’s dig in.

Automata Conundum

We say that our dev cycle is longer than it really is - in reality we are always playing our game, iterating on recently built features, and tweaking along the way. Sometimes this is minimal (in the cases where our first guess is pretty good), other times, a mechanics nightmare starts to unfold we would have never expected. So here’s the situation we had.

In your normal RTS, city sim thing, all your AI’s have some centralized register of where this or that resource is stored and how to get it. Using this they can easily route themselves around the town, efficiently using and restocking resources. This doesn’t work in Avalon - you need global and shared automation-spaces. AI’s need to automate inter-player trade, what’s more, one player may have 2 groups of AI’s in different parts of the world - you wouldn’t want your settlers walking all the way back to your capital for a piece of wood. So we needed an intuitive analog to shared resource indexing that worked inter-player and in a decentralized way. 

Our first stab at this was that every AI simply looked in its immediate surroundings for stockpiles every time it needed something. It was simple, seemingly could be emergent - what could possibly go wrong??? It was a nightmare. You could place a construction site down outside of the range of your wood stockpile - wood is right over there, but now you need to automate a who supply chain just to build the building. You could make these survey areas larger, but at scale, this was gunna cost a lot. We had to make an efficiency decision to avoid massive, frequent queries to spatial.

Where we ended with feels natural for Avalon, and it actually solves other mechanics issues that it wasn’t contrived for, so I’m really excited about it. 

Town-Tile Claiming

So in the new system, to automate anything permanent (that can persist and automate while you are offline) you need to place your buildings in a town/district/settlement/whatever you want to call it. You can found a town/settlement by building a settlement/town center building, which automatically claims a certain amount of tiles around it. From here you can only build in the claimed tiles, each building you build further increases land claim. For every building in this district, a local index of storage, etc. exists and AI’s can automate within them. Using stockpiles, you can set AI’s to transfer resources between these districts. Additionally, players within the same town/district can setup automated purchases between each other.

At the same time, this system begins a conception of war and empire building mechanics. The town centers control town automation and basically the AI in them, so capturing a town center is a natural mechanic for conquest. We’ll talk more on these implications later as we unfold exactly how to use them.

So What’s Next

So we’re currently working on implementing this tile-claiming system, it’s a good 65% done I’d say. We’re polishing up a lot of UI stuff as well. Once this town system is ready, we can throw in repopulation and food pretty easily. From here the only thing standing between us and stage 1 is well... a wall. Yep we need walls and defensive buildings. But that’s it! then we’re gunna stop to play a bit, confirm stage 1 of ACDF and start rolling into politics, banners, chat, and of course, formal conquest.

[lilsumngames]

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