Game Projects

Basic Stuff

2d fixed screens

Turn-based multiplayer, any number of players supported. Kind of a 4X game, though early stages are more survival-based.

The actual gameplay is a survival-->automation ramp. Pulls heavily from Untitled TBS, Swarm and also the crewed games to some extent (crew management is way less complex however).

Actions limits

You have a limited amount of Actions you can do on your turn. This definitely scales up your 4X score as you unlock different stages, but the amount of actions is roughly the same between different stages, to keep turn length roughly equivalent.

Movement of any unit costs Action points -- starting out the only unit you have available is yourself. With other stages you'll have different units you can control, or groups of them at other stages.

World Basis

There's a separate World for each player -- a plane or something where the colors are a bit different (but within some acceptable aesthetic range).

Worlds are connected together via Portals, which have to be Activated to go 2-way between the portal you're activating and a portal of your choice on another player's World. These connections are permanent.

Activating a Portal costs Energized Crystal, which is kind of hard to achieve in early stages so the multiplayer aspects tend to not happen until later on.

However, you can trade with other players at any time with a portal whether it's activated or not -- it'll push to them and they can then make the exchange at a portal of their choice.

Early Stages

As mentioned, the game begins as a kind of 2d survival game, pulled heavily in concept from shatterloop but obviously heavily simplified.

Your main goal here is collecting enough food and water to have a larger population, which unlocks the next stage.

Food can come from a few different sources:

Wild plants will give you some when harvested.

Fishing will give you fish, assuming you have a rod and bait of course. There's no actual fishing mechanic, you just fish freely with no time spent on it, using bait accordingly. Granted this does consume AP.

You can hunt wild animals -- they don't move, thankfully. You will however need some way of attacking them and ideally not dying in the process.

You can also create Tools from wood and stone that will allow you to do all of the above more effectively (consume less AP basically). You can also craft Shoes which will make you use less AP when moving.

You also have a hunger bar and a thirst bar and have to fulfill those needs or you'll die. This can impact the amount of food and water you're stockpiling obviously.

If you die, you forfeit your next turn entirely and will then respawn at your origin point (the Home Crystal generally). You'll also lose whatever items were in your inventory permanently, with the exception of Tools and general Equipment. Still pretty devastating though.

Getting to the next stage

You'll need enough food and water stockpiled to invite Settlers in, who will proceed to use it.

In order to stockpile food and water you'll need to Built a Depot building by hand, as well as a Housing building. Depots allow you to store more resources, and Housing allow you to have more people. You need maybe one housing building per 2 settlers. Building both of these requires stone and wood and is also time consuming and yes you still consume food and water along the way. With a Hammer the construction goes quicker. You can thankfully just do it in stages though -- some percentage points here and there rather than the whole thing all at once. This allows you to also do other things during your turn.

Settler Stage

Settlers are basically identical to the player unit, except they might have Specialties that make them better suited to different roles.

When you have the requirements met, you'll get to pick the Settlers you want from some list. They're all a bit different around their specialties and maybe carrying capacity / food needs, and might bring useful equipment with them as well.

Settlers act much like the player (and have to be individually equipped) except that they can move in groups and can just be assigned specific tasks that you've already explored (like fishing or chopping down trees or whatever).

I'm a little fuzzy on the details of resource allocation -- ideally you can harvest stuff from the same plant or whatever tiles over and over but there's limits. This probably implies that the map is a lot more compact than a normal 2D game, which is fine. There's still a lot of room for exploration regardless.

I'm thinking that only Exploration/building and changing Settler/group orders consumes AP -- anything else is just automated, so getting those automation chains up is pretty crucial to gameplay progression. I'll probably need a v2 post at some point though because again I'm very fuzzy on all the details here.

Metal and Caves

To get to the next stage, you need Metal, and acquiring it requires exploring caves either by yourself or (later) tasking people to gather stuff from them. However exploring caves draws from Kavernz and requires Torches, Gunpowder and Ropes. These all have to be fabricated from varied surface resources.

The good news is that these items aren't consumed, instead it's just a requirement that you have enough on your person and the same applies for any settler you send into a cave. Using these items does however consume AP so there are still limits even if the items themselves aren't limited.

Once you have the items available your goal is to find metal resource pockets. There are several different types, and again, I'm fuzzy on how they generate exactly:

Copper -- used in wiring, but in this early stage used to make bronze.

Tin -- also used to make bronze. Used also for more advanced food preservation.

Iron -- should be obvious.

Coal -- same here. Early on it's mostly used in forging steel.

Oil -- will be useful later into the industry stage.

Lead -- used in Pipes, which become more important over time.

Gold -- used to Trade, unlocking different things. Fuzzy on the mechanics here but it's definitely useful.

Crystal -- used in magical applications and opening portals. Very rare though and also can't be mined without metal tools.

Travel Time and Roads

Sending a settler to a POI consumes some amount of time (represented in turns) and gives you some kind of Yield. Idk if the settler unit actually explicitly exists (more fuzziness!). The time here is based on the distance I guess.

This can be improved by building Roads -- it'll decrease travel time as well as allow you personally to move without consuming as much AP. Or maybe you can make whole long screen movements while using minimal AP -- I like this better. Or even teleport to a POI, consuming some AP accordingly (I like this best).

Unfortunately roads have to be laid out manually. You can certainly task settlers to lay them down from one destination to the next somehow, though this will definitely take time this early on.

Domestication

Before I move on, Domestication is a pretty important feature at this stage. It makes sense for it to be an unlock gained by mining Gold. Or maybe specific unlocks for specific things.

Domestication allows you to create Farms and domesticate animals as well which gets around both resource limits and travel time. Additionally though:

Domesticated chickens will produce Eggs, which are a valuable renewable food source (it's better than waiting for chickens to grow and then slaughtering them).

Sheep will produce Wool, which is way way more efficient than plant fiber at producing textiles.

Cows will produce Milk, which can be turned into Cheese -- a dense, high-protein nonrotting food source, so highly valuable obviously. Milk can also be used as a food source in its own right, though it degrades and it's weaker.

Horses give a movement speed multiplier and AP reduction. They can also carry more items when sent with a group. Highly useful.

Animals have to be fed plant matter, which can either be gathered or farmed.

There might be a soil/fertilizer consumable pipeline for crop farming. I'm not sure yet.

To simplify things, fish shouldn't ever need to be farmed though you can maybe make a pond closer to home to get around the distance issues. And Bait is an endless resource.

Industry Stage

In this stage, you're ramping up the production of everything by building metal machines to do work for you.

These machines all require some obnoxious amount of metal and other resources and also need a fuel source (starting out, this is coal or maybe charcoal if you have enough wood available).

It's worth it though because the yields are a lot higher and settlers are largely just manning them and transporting resources back (ideally by horse).

Vehicles

Also at this stage you can create Vehicles to improve overall automation of stuff.

Boats get some kind of huge upgrade as well.

And you can also make war vehicles.

Fuel stuff

One downside of this stage is you need to keep your machines continuously supplied with fuel -- coal or charcoal initially.

You can however make refiner machines that'll turn oil into a more efficient fuel source. As an added bonus, they can mine oil and refine it directly on site, making transport easier.

Electricity and Factories

A certain big machine or building or something requires a heck of a lot of resources, but when supplied with Fuel will generate Electricity.

With Copper, you can connect this to machines and factories, granting them continuous Fuel which will make your yield go way way up as well as produce less logistical headaches.

Factories

You can also create Factories -- these require Electricity (and being on the grid) but will create items for you much much faster than settlers would. Very useful stuff here.

Computers

Computers require Electricity and some kind of weird resource spread probably dictated by weird refinements of other resources.

In any case, this is the stage where Automation gets kind of crazy -- you can expand the production of existing buildings and machines and kind of tower them vertically to get more yield out of them as your CPU resources increase. Same deal with Vehicle speed, farming time, etc.

The progress here is somewhat runaway, but it doesn't necessarily confer a huge military advantage because any other player that's reached this stage will have more destructive weapons available.