ProtoRig

 Where'd we leave off with the rig?

I'd been planning out the shapes for heads and bodies:

Theoretically, we could split faces into two parts: eyes/brows and nose/mouth. With the taller set of heads, the nose/mouth portion would scale separately to fit the head size.

I took a stab at a starter set of images:

And Nate built a character lab so that we could see what those pieces looked like put together:

• I've set up the Photoshop files so that we'll eventually be able to try and move their pupils around, but these are just "flattened" eyes for now.
• The names are lifted from the old Wildermyth name generator, which we'll update at some point. They help spark ideas though.
• The colors are also lifted from Wildermyth. Man, it's convenient having an existing bank of colors for hair & skin that feel plausible.
• Eventually, we'll have a range of squashing and stretching that the bodies will do to simulate different heights. Preliminary squashing in Photoshop was promising; you could squash quite a bit before it started to look janky. But for now, everyone is "tall."

Around this time, we decided that giving the colonists shoulders and a neck would be an improvement. I also filled out a few more faces and hairstyles to get a better gestalt of these guys:

I did a quick test with beady eyes as well, but it looked pretty bad, at least with the current head and face proportions. I want to give the eyes-with-moveable pupils a solid try. If we hate it later for some reason, I can fall back to reworking the faces to fit beady eyes better.

We're getting some little guys now! There's a magic tipping point where upon looking at any one of them, I switch from "ugh what even is this," to "Hello!! Who do we have here? Ohhhh I know who you are, I can probably make up a backstory and character arc for you on the spot. And we'll fix your weird jawline later, don't worry, you'll feel much better... Anyway, welcome!"

It's still early though, obviously. The longer/taller heads are going to need more attention, they still look awkward sometimes, but they can simmer for now. The next thing I want to build out is a starter set of outfit pieces to mix and match.

Vegetation I

 

We'll have some background vegetation, some of which will be interactive and some of which might not. I hope it'll add some prettiness to the caverns/grottos/canyons. It seems possible to get vegetation and rocks feeling backgroundy enough that they don't visually obscure the figures.

The big trees will grow from saplings, is the idea. So that you don't just wipe all the majestic trees off the map.

I've got a couple sets for Nate to put in once he's ready, and we'll see how weird it looks and eventually figure out how you interact with these things. Or anything, really.

First Sketches: Rig Body Shapes

Hopefully I'll start in on foundations for a character rig soon. Because we won't be showcasing limbs as much, this means that we can have more different body types.

At first I was thinking I'd need to have different rigs for tall & short figures, but testing it out, we should be able to get away with just scaling for stature. This would be great news because it means art hours go to more outfits, faces and hairs, and less to redrawing the same content.

Speaking of redrawing though, not having classes with specific armor tied to them means that every character can wear every outfit. This should theoretically be okay:

(The hair scribbles aren't significant, they're just helping with the gestalt.)

I'm planning to start with masculine and feminine versions of 4 types: slim, medium, brawny, and round. 8 rigs, which should be manageable.

We're gonna downplay the lower body a lot, BUT we would like people to be able to sit down on chairs in this game. (Getting ambitious, y'all.) Which means that joint around the hips will be a little tricky to work around. If I want a higher-waisted outfit, regular old suspenders, anything like that, I might need to think it through.

Chasm Farming

More elevators!

Vertical irrigation!

Fish ponds and water filters that look like serving dishes for some reason!

I have a sinking feeling this whole water thing would be quite complicated if we implemented it, so I am glad Nate is a systems guy, and I trust him to not get in over his head.

Appreciation

We were talking about how cooking might work, like how much food is cooked at one time, how it's stored and consumed, etc. I mentioned that despite whatever the optimal game design is, I did not want to keep track of colonists' food likes and dislikes.

As a person who makes meals for three picky children in real life, turns out my ultimate gameplay fantasy is "everyone eats the same thing for dinner and likes it." Go figure.

I jokingly added, "AND ALSO whoever cooked the food is highly regarded."

Nate said that hey actually, there was something to that. 

Maybe the person who cooked the stew does get a little social bump from the people who ate it. And maybe the person who harvested the potatoes gets a social bump from the cook. Maybe the doctor gets appreciated by their patients. Maybe the wall-builder appreciates the person who helped them haul stone. All that would be on top of the normal social bumps that people would get from interaction "events" (advising, teaching, complimenting, gift-giving, etc). You could have a world where not only are the colonists doing work, but they're appreciating each other's work, driving a chunk of that organic under-the-hood growth of relationships over time.

It's hard to think through whether that would create weird game incentives, but I bet we could get around them and try to keep the "appreciation" economy relatively balanced.

Later Style Concept 1 - Doctor/Lab

 

How far do we go, regarding technology? I want to avoid the thing where late-game, you have to build "futuristic" stuff that's all shiny metal and neon lights and you lose the whole vibe that you started this place for. Obviously we won't be sticking to a strict historical template, but we've been wondering what sorts of places you'd work up to.

Instead of a few bandages in a box, there could be a medical office/hospital. It'd dovetail nicely with any chemical research your guys were doing. You've brought back exotic medicinal plants and keep them in pots. You have more wrought iron, you have glass, you have bricks. You have elevators, you absolutely have elevators.

Other ideas of things to concept:

• Late game farming
• Communicating with other settlements
• Oh no there's a bad thing in this place, how do we clear it out?
• Exploring a toxic spot - protective gear, detectors, etc.
• Sending out shipments of stuff.

Will It Build? aka The Grayest Mockup

 

All these png assets I made for constructing rooms and stuff—will they fit together even remotely? Let's find out. Lord knows it won't be exhaustive, but at least we can get a basic proof of concept. Also making big mockups with notes is more considerate to Nate than dump-trucking a hundred images into source control and assuming it'll be obvious how to create an architecture system from them.

beep beep GLHF

This mockup is especially fun because it's entirely made up of linked images. So when I'm like, "Hm, the floor should have a stronger top edge," I can go edit those floor images, re-export them, and the mockup gets updated.

It is not especially fun because I haven't made any other assets yet, so everything here is pretty "backgroundy" when it comes to gameplay, and I need to go against my instinct to crank up the saturation and contrast, at least for now.

Other discoveries:

• Oh, I guess we'll want two "kinds" of stone stairs, one you can walk in front of and one you can't. Does the game try to just build the right kind of stair based on the context or will you have to specify it? Don't know yet.
• Related open question: How much headroom do stairs need? Could colonists even build stairs that they couldn't go up?
• What happens when you divide a room in half with a wall, but then there's still a walkable-looking floor underneath it? Will a janky little cap-image on the wall mostly fix that? 
• What things do you kinda want spilling over the edges of the grid and what things do you not want doing that?
• Hm looks like ladders will want a little half-height cap on the top but not the bottom, interesting.
• Uh oh, what does it look like when colonists are in the middle of building a floor or staircase? Do they complete things square by square like Rimworld does? That doesn't fit great with the way we want to tile edges, but it might be necessary. Because otherwise, if you don't fill in any actual pngs until the whole project is finished, you're punished for taking on bigger chunks of work at a time.