Combat Blurps

For a long time, we had a constraint on ourselves of, "What if we just avoided combat as much as possible? Will that make us come up with more creative mechanics?" Now, the more we spin our wheels, the more we're realizing that maybe combat does add a lot of stakes and activity and all that fun stuff, and maybe we can just have it. But it's not going to look the same as combat in, say, Rimworld. We have a different view, and I think we want things to be less chaotic and deadly. A lot of the time, you'll have 2-12 scrappy little steaders, and you're giving them orders in what's essentially a giant ant farm. What might actually happen in those circumstances?...

1. A wave of crablins is harassing your stead. You've got a few dudes, and you've got two muskets and a couple big pokey poles, like pitchforks or whatever. You'll want people on the muskets, and you'll want at least one person standing in front of the shooters, poking the crablins and keeping them at a distance. Any extra folks, you can decide if you want them on stick-duty, or aiding the muskets. If you have one person who's got way better aim than everyone else, you might even want to set up a system where Buddy is loading the second musket while Crackshot shoots the first, then they swap. Might be smarter.

2. Oh no, some crablins stole your hardware and cloth! Crablins are notorious for stealing stuff from you and taking it back to their nests in the haunted forests. They can run through the tangly roots blocking haunted tunnels, but you have to machete through. It's worth finding these nests and taking them out, though. You get your stuff back, and probably some sweet loot that they took from other people/settlements a long time ago too.

You can get in there with your fighters and get the stuff, but crablins will keep congregating in this spot. You could clear them out for good if you spray griffin scent around, they're terrified of griffins. But for that, you're either going to need to craft something out of some griffin monsterparts (ew), or you're going to need a tamed griffin to come sleep and pee in the place for a few days (ew but lol).

3. There's a big open cavern with a evil haunted tree in the middle of it. It's got nasty bats all flyin' around it. Maybe the bats are flyin' out of the tree! You've got to dispose of that tree to make the forest stop being haunted so you can live there. You could run in with your musket-teams I guess. That'd be hard and slow. Or you could do other things:

• You could build a smoke machine that grounds and slows the bats, so that they're easier to deal with while you're chopping that tree. And you could strap it to a wagon and wheel it in, or you could build it in a pocket of space underneath the tree and run some pipes up into the cavern. Your guys don't like the smoke either though, so they're gonna need some facial protection.
• You could build net-launchers that take bats out of the fight for a period of time before they gnaw themselves free.
• You could have somebody luring bats out of one tunnel by waving around meat or making certain noises, then you could have a trap where you collapse the entrance to the tunnel and cut the bats off from the main cavern. Gotta make sure your little bat-bait guy will be okay though.
  
  

4. There's a slumbering giant pinespider covering an ore vein you really want to get at. It's going to take a long time to kill it, and it's dangerous. You can pull the little trick where you shoot it from a tunnel that it's too big to fit through, but it can dig pretty fast when it gets mad. You could try your luck with off-the-cuff kiting, or, before you wake it up, you could set up a series of barricades with tiny openings that you can fall back through as you fight.

Other thoughts: Are there times when you'd want to find or dig a tunnel to get height advantage over somebody? Drop something on them? A time when you'd want to divert water into an area? What kinds of traps can you set up? Traps are fun, can be created through giving orders to guys, and you get to feel clever when they work.

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.

Different Settlements, Common Goal

Nate's been playing Against the Storm, a colony game where you build out a colony until it meets some goal, then you set it aside and move on to the next one which is in a tougher biome. You build as many of these as you can before the big "hundred year storm" or whatever comes through and wipes them out and you start over. If you build enough, you can get some kind of buff that like, gives you more time before the next storm so that you can build further and get the next buff.

Or something like that, you should ask him.

Neither of us are a fan of wiping out your work on our particular game, but this did get us thinking about a multi-colony setup.

So you're coming into a hostile world/planet, and your ultimate goal is to fix the planet and make it livable. That seems like a pretty good definition for a "run," or what you'd call a playthrough. We tossed around the idea of making multiple "runs" per planet, each happening on a different part of the planet, and having a planet be more like what a player-profile was in Wildermyth (lots of different campaigns, but single legacy & elemental unlocks, etc). That brought up the question of how these "runs" would interact with each other. Nate proposed "maybe quite a bit" and I wasn't sure about it at first, since it sounded like it might get complicated and you might end up with the callous dirtbag NPC problem.

But! I'm coming around to the idea that the game pushes you toward multiple specialized settlements. It means you get to go through the fun setup stages of a colony multiple times, and hopefully each time it feels different because you're e.g. setting up a mining outpost in one biome, setting up your fiber-farm/ranch in another. Maybe you can pick a couple colonists to start the new settlement when you're ready. Rimworld had a fun DLC thing like that where you were prompted to start a new colony after you hit a certain "wealth" mark, but you got to pick only 5 colonists to bring with you. We loved that part! (It meant that our best guy got to bring his kids and leave behind his cranky bullying mother-in-law! Joke was on us though, she showed up again later and we had to grudgingly take her in.)

So anyway, you end up with these multiple outposts and villages and whatnot, and maybe you're not actually connecting them with roads or tunnels, but there can be some limited trade between them. You'd want to put limitations on this so that you don't end up with the sugar-daddy colony making your later efforts trivial. But MAYBE, in order to fix whatever you need to fix on the hostile surface, you're going to have to start building stuff up there. And because it's so hostile, you're not going to be able to get the food and suits and tools and materials that you need to do whatever high-level stuff you're doing late game. SO, you're relying more and more on all the people and colonies you've built up to this point.

Ideally, everybody's helping each other (farming village is feeding mining village, mining village is sending back better metal farming tools etc), and in the back of their minds, they've all got this "save the planet" motivation.

IN FACT, and this is the part that we cackled at when we thought of it, maybe colonists have a state not only for how comfortable they are, but how much they feel like they're contributing to the good of the world. You know that part in a colony or building game where you're like, "Okay, I've got the basics figured out. I could just coast indefinitely at this point. Why wouldn't I, actually?..." I hate that point, I'm so bad at getting past it and sometimes just quit. So what if, when you hit that point, your little characters had a literal conversation with each other where they were like, "Don't you ever feel like you want to be part of something bigger than yourself?"

Dang, game. I DO feel that sometimes.

And then I don't know how hand-holdy we'd have to be to get the player to specialize their settlements in a way that actually moved them through the game. Hopefully you'd see the high-level tech you wanted, see the components required, and figure out that hey, those guys over in Irontown could definitely help with this. We like the idea of one of the early/midgame goals being some kind of scanner that gives you hints about where good places are for different kinds of settlements. Then you have an idea of what's possible and what you'd want to try and build next.

This is all still super woobly, but we like the idea of a.) encouraging multiple colonies that hopefully feel different because they're trying to accomplish different things in necessarily different biomes, and b.) everybody wanting to help each other and accomplish big goals that they couldn't do on their own.

Dora and Bruno Try On Some Faces

 

This was an experiment using assets from some other concept art. Could we turn people who looked like that into a useable rig? Aaaaannd...

• Q: How does it look trying this thing where I redraw faces to fit head shapes?
• A: Looks fine. Redrawing the whole face each time is the dumb, brute-force approach. But it gives me the most control to just make it look good. A couple years ago, I took at least two stabs at a more modular approach where the eyes/nose/mouth were separated out and recombined, but it looked like ass each time.
• Q: How much of a pain would it be to do that?
• A: Not a pain at all for 4 faces x 2 heads = 8! :D Which tells me very little about how much of a pain it would be for 40 faces x 6 heads x 15 expressions = 3600.
• Q: What about hair and hats?
• A: Uhhh I don't know, I wasn't thinking about that here, I just used the concept art.
• Q: Haha what if everybody had to be wearing a hat all the time and the hairstyles didn't even have real tops??
• Q: So can I make different body builds too? Do the heads look okay on different size bodies?
• A: Yeah it's fine and we should definitely do that.
• Q: Doesn't that mean redrawing every outfit though?
• A: Ehh I already did that with Wildermyth and I regret nothing. Plus we're probably gonna pull some tricks were a.) arms are nonexistent and hands only appear as circles when they're holding something, and b.) practically no customization of legs. So it's way easier.
• Q: Yeah and um facial hair?
• A: That's going to require a Plan. I look forward to someone coming up with a simple, ingenious, easy-to-implement Plan for facial hair that looks fantastic.