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.
  

Canyon III - Wherefore Art Th'outlines

Taking a more detailed pass at what architecture and furniture might look like. I think/hope we could get away with doing dark outlines on figures and squeaking by with just drop shadows for objects. Then I see a thing emerging too where foreground stone architecture has these lighter outlines, and that might be fine.

Haven't thought AT ALL about interface and how you can tell what the heck you're interacting with and how. That's scary and we'll need to think about what you're interacting with in the first place. Nate mentioned not wanting gameplay to take place mostly in menus and submenus; like, in-world as much as possible. That's a good goal.

So yeah, instead of thinking about that, let's think about stone skinning. One of the first things we'll probably build out is well, building. Getting little people to remove stone and then put it back in whatever configuration you tell them to. In that case, we'll need little (or big?) piles of different stone types that the little people go to, and little stones that they carry around, and oh right we'll need actual little people. I started a test rig earlier this year and I think we have enough for Nate to get a figure walking around. Seeing that will give us a lot of info on character visuals--like what reads or doesn't read at different sizes, how thick/bold to make the various outlines, and for course: to pupil or not to pupil.