Presidium- An SF Citybuilder

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#41

Images for the various Schools- Shaper, Logician, Initiate, Collective, Spacer and Symbiote.

The three non-human Preserves- Changelings, Krech and Jovians.

Yeah… as it turns out, that long, rambling checklist has been an absolute doozy. On the other hand, I’ve actually gotten farther than I expected with the artwork!

I’ve actually hit something of a crisis of confidence on this project. I’ve realised that one of the basic problems I’ve had with furthering progress with this game was that some of my goals here are contradictory. On the one hand, I want a game that deals with large-scale geopolitical tensions, dynastic histories and terraforming efforts, and on the other hand, I want an economic micro-simulation of day-to-day affairs within a particular village-or-town-sized colonial settlement. I should probably have realised this from day one, but the scales here basically do not fit eachother, and something needs to be cut.

I can either make a game about the latter using my existing, and heavy, investment in 2d-isometric artwork and graphics pipeline, or I can start over from scratch and make a game in the style of Crusader Kings that will actually address the former large-scale themes (and might simplify the AI implementation.)

A very basic version of the latter, I can probably kick together in a matter of weeks. It won’t look pretty, and will have the barest minimum of content even if I recycle assets from other games, but it will be enough to get feedback on. By contrast, the art and models I’ve done for the SF game are much more extensive and professional-looking, and I could spit out something loosely comparable to, say, Caesar 3 within a few months.

So, I’m kind of in two minds here, and I would welcome any feedback, advice or suggestions that people have on the subject of what kind of game they’d like to see, and/or what features are most important to them. Thoughts?

#42

I much prefer the games on the micro scale. Caesar 3 was one of my all time favorite games :slight_smile: You could still have the game on the micro scale and a more abstract “strategic map” where you choose to place your settlements, allocate resources to them, and so forth.

#43

Absolutely brilliant artwork.

This game needs to happen.

#44

I’ll take that as a sign to proceed with the current engine/assets, then. Thanks, guys.

I have given some thought to the idea of a larger-scale ‘strategic map’- in fact, it’d be almost essential for doing any kind of external trade- but it’s still a kind of awkward marriage. I’ll try to stick the current code-base up on GitHub over the next few weeks, so folks can have something more concrete to critique.

Oh, speaking of ‘large-scale’, I did come up with a run-down on the setup for interstellar politics:

[i]In reading order-

  • Axis Novena, a frigid, low-gravity world with extensive ship-building
  • Parem V, an irradiated world home to House Procyon and the Initiates
  • Nordsei, a tropical planet with a strong Collective presence
  • Solipsus, the former imperial capital
  • Haliban, a temperate, moderately-urbanised world and home to House Altair
  • The World Forge, a hollow asteroid-constructed sphere courtesy of the Shapers
  • Asra Novi, a cosmopolitan desert world with substantial terraforming
  • Diapsor (AKA Bloodstone), a semi-arid world famous for it’s warriors
  • Theta Rho, home to House Rigel and the Krech
  • Urym Hive, a polluted high-gravity world covered by ruined cities
  • Termagant, a frigid world encasing a liquid ocean, a stop-off for the Spacers
  • Calivor, capital of the Republic and home to the Logicians
  • Albedo C97, home to the Changelings

Edited for extra info.[/i]

#45

I don’t think the two game types necessarily conflict with each other. I think you just need to keep them relatively independent. For example, you could have the country-to-country stuff happening at an extremely slow time scale, and have some aggregate of local stats affecting the country stats.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

In the modern world, each person controls a country. So there’s the US and EU and Russia and whatever. Connections between these countries are tenuous and diplomatic. If you want to attack another country, it will involve a bunch of small-scale battles, except for some macro-scaled weapons like nukes. When you drill down to the economy in California, for example, you’ll find it has a lot of software studios built, farmland, whatever. You can increase the farmland in a given area to increase the overall output California gives, which affects aggregate incoming food for the US. Then you can trade wheat with Japan to get more computer parts.

If you decide to invade Europe, then you recruit your army from your country and go to attack Portugal. This is a zoomed-in point of view in Portugal, where you are able to destroy military supply depots, or civilian areas (lowering the macro opinion of other countries of you).

etc. etc.

The game would require a massive amount of balancing and would take a whole lot of time, but as long as you keep the macro simple, like of like in Crusader Kings 2, then you are okay allowing more detail at the micro scale. A player could theoretically never do anything to a micro region and just leave it running as-is, but if he decides he needs more wheat or whatever he can go in and manually build some more farms.

#46

[quote=“Eli Delventhal,post:45,topic:37009”]
I’ve considered an approach along those lines, but the examples you’re giving are actually all on a pretty similar scale (in that California is at least comparable in size to Japan.) Whereas, what I’m talking about is what happens in a few years to Greenwich Village impacting what happens over centuries to Mars.

Drilling down to the micro level at-will raises a host of problems that I can’t think of any easy solution to. Let’s say I spend a session building up a medium-sized city in the Pavonis Sector, then get an offer of promotion, and move on to the Acheron Sector. I spend another few years on settlement and terraforming efforts, and then move back for another term governing Pavonis Sector. In that period, people will have been born, died, married, promoted, migrated in or out, and buildings will have been erected or demolished in response to changing climate and economic pressures. I can hardly simulate every settlement on the planet with the same level of detail as I would the current sector (or even just the capital of the sector.) So how do I convincingly account for all that change when I jump back to the old settlement?

Just having the whole place remain static seems kinda fake (which is a problem I had with Emperor, another entry in the citybuilder series.) In principle I could just institute a ‘No Going Back To Old Settlements’ rule, but that’s also faintly artificial. And what happens when I drill down to a settlement that never existed before, except as an abstraction?

There’s also the basic problem of plausibly affecting anything on a planetary or even regional scale. Even if you squeezed in the maximum possible population on a 256x256 tile map (which is about the maximum I can handle,) you’re only looking 10,000 citizens or so, versus populations in the millions or billions. And given that a large part of the charm of a game like Majesty was following individual lives, I can’t just handwave it and say they’re ‘representative’ of a much larger population- Individual citizens are exactly that, individual citizens.

So… this is not something I know how to solve, and it kinda goes beyond my original intentions when I started this project: (A) have something I could put on my resumé for job-hunting purposes, and (B) provide the Majesty community with a viable successor to their favourite game, given that the Majesty franchise itself is practically FUBAR at this point. If the Majesty community still exists at all and wants something more than that, well… that will be up to them, and their willingness to contribute.

#47

As long as the micro and macro scale games are fun, people are going to forgive unrealistic time scales. Suspension of disbelief is required for any sci-fi themed game anyway.

As for Majesty, I found the original game tedious and the sequel was too punishingly difficult to ever be fun.

#48

I thought that Majesty was a game whose potential was never fully realised. I can recognise, in actually playing it, that the economic system is kinda tedious and the faction setup is rather unbalanced, which means that many ostensible ‘choices’ in the game are effectively either mandatory or pointless. (A lot of multiplayer games followed the marketplace-guardhouse-inn-rogue’s guild-palace upgrade- elves-palace upgrade-fairgrounds-helia/helia build-sequence-formula, or something very similar, because nothing else is competitive. This is compounded by heroes tending to need more babysitting than they strictly ought.)

But the ‘buzz’ I get from seeing a mature settlement with all the heroes ambling about their business is the same I get from Dwarf Fortress or the clockwork perfection of a C3 housing loop. For me, a large part of the fun is my ability to look at this imaginary world, and relate to it’s underlying patterns of cause and effect. And broken causality disrupts my ‘fun’.

But, I can’t speak for others. If you don’t mind my asking, what aspects of Majesty did you consider tedious, so that I can at least get an idea of what not to implement?

#49

You covered it well with the rigid build order and the babysitting. And the “indirect control” mechanic was laughably simplistic: you simply planted a bounty flag anywhere you liked, and heroes would go for the highest bounty without fail. As an RTS goes, it’s a lonely affair with no mass formations, no rush or turtling, just endless scouts and a few hero units. As a city builder, you feel no connection to the city since you’re constantly having to shift away from it to send hero units further into the hinterlands, and there aren’t any real civilian units to care about anyway. All that’s left is some pseudo-rpg mechanic with units that have no real customization, interaction, or behavior other than “seek out highest bounty flag”. It was fun for about an hour.

#50

I haven’t played a lot of these kinds of simulations. I played Ceasar 2 which I like, little civilation, little sim city.
Tried the later Utopia game in which I never knew what I was doing.

Here is my opinion: The art is absolutely great. But whatever kind of game you make, make it simple for beginners
with good design it can go really deep for skilled players, but the broad masses aren’t incredibly versed in this type of game, let alone have the time for this stuff.
So have good game design which welcomes newcomers.

and also the art is so beautiful… dont let it just sit there and have a static game. people, especially nowadays need some action

#51

[quote=“sproingie,post:49,topic:37009”]
While I can see where you’re coming from, I think you may be being a little uncharitable on ‘Majesty Classic’, where the characters did have a range of behaviours distinct from chasing flags- they’d visit inns, pay taxes, go exploring, play music, plant flowers, heal the wounded, charm animals/undead, raise buildings, and even form parties spontaneously with the right partners, not to mention the requisite shopping expeditions for better equipment, potions or spells. Even the things which heroes didn’t do gave the classes personality, insofar as paladins never poisoned their weapons and monks never visited brothels. A lot of this behaviour was more sporadic, erratic or misplaced than I’d like (healers trailing tax collectors when my warriors were being mauled by trolls spring to mind,) but it wasn’t wholly absent, as was largely the case with Maj2*. And I think that’s ultimately where a lot of Majesty’s appeal came from (the semi-cartoonish aesthetic, tinge of humour and deconstruction of fantasy cliché making up the rest.)

But I appreciate the feedback, and I agree that both the bounty-flag system could use a little more finesse and that more civilian units would help to make the city feel more animated, which are both concerns I’m hoping to address. I want to:

  • Use ‘Mission’ mechanics to combine bounty-placement with party-formation, and perhaps afford incentives distinct from cash payment.
  • Have multiple resources, manufacturing and services within the civilian economy, perhaps with roads/walls/quarters to keep things organised.

(*To be fair, calling InoCo’s efforts FUBAR may be a little uncharitable too- Maj2 wasn’t a terrible RTS, and Defenders of Ardania/Warlock: MOTA seem to have worked well in their respective genres. But everything that made the original setting unique has been systematically erased, along with all but the faintest pretence at simulationist priorities. The franchise endures, but only in name.)

#52

[quote=“Cero,post:50,topic:37009”]
Fair point. One of the trade-offs involved in a game with a high degree of autonomous agent behaviour is that, in principle, a lot of micromanagement can be taken out of the hands of the player, which often makes entry easier for beginners- but it also, by definition, reduces the importance of direct player intervention. I’m not certain if that’s what you mean by ‘action’, or whether you’re referring to stuff like chase scenes and explosions (though I am certainly planning for the game to have at least a little combat on the side. :))

In general, finding ways for the player to have influence over the simulated world while respecting the integrity of its agents’ motives and minimising busywork can get fairly nuanced- it even affects things like how and when housing, road networks or croplands should be sited. (I’d rather that the player not have to bother with zoning every square metre of vegetable garden, but I also don’t want, e.g, apartment blocs materialising on top of ore deposits.)

One other area that might give the player more of an opportunity to ‘get their hands dirty’, so to speak, would be to either implement some Majesty/Dungeon-Keeper ‘sovereign spells’ as personal psyonic powers, and/or to create a controllable player-character for direct involvment. (I’ve actually been a little leery about the former, since I usually like my SF as ‘hard’ as possible… genre precedents notwithstanding. The latter, of course, creates a bunch of other problems.)

#53

http://s24.postimg.org/3n0ynak11/nursery.png

For anyone who’s interested, I now have a working copy of the source code up on Github:

(Which means I’ve settled on a working title for the game. There’s no executable as such, and it’s only ‘playable’ in the most charitable tech-demo sense of the word, but if you open it in eclipse you should be able to run the main() method from src.game.common.TestGame. Hit L and S to load and save.)

I have a small portion of the overall economy and supply-and-demand-chain implemented- farming, mining, manufacture of parts and plastics, housing placement- but there’s a fair number of bugs to work out and a good deal of ‘stub’ functionality.

What I’m eventually hoping to implement is roughly as follows:

[quote][i]
Gene Samples -> Starches or Greens or Protein or Wood at Botanical Station
Starches or Wood -> Carbons at Flesh Still
Corpses -> Protein and Spice and Hides at Flesh Still

Carbons -> Plastics at Fabricator
(Gems or Hides) and Plastics -> Decor or Outfits at Fabricator
Plastics -> Pressfeed at Audit Office

Power and Water -> Starches or Protein at Culture Vats
Greens or Spice -> Soma or Medicines at Culture Vats
Gene Samples -> Clones at Culture Vats

Gene Samples at Surveyor and Sickbay
(Metals or Carbons or Isotopes) and Gems at Excavation Shaft
(Metals or Carbons or Isotopes) and Spice at Dust Panner

Metals -> Parts at Artificer
Parts -> Devices or Armour or Circuits at Artificer
Circuits -> Inscription or Neural Scans at Archives

Isotopes -> Power and Fuel Rods at Reactor
Fuel Rods and Parts -> Atomics at Atomic Fane
Fuel Rods and Parts and Circuits -> Vehicles or Freighters at Shipyard

Power and Water at Solar Array or Windtrap
Life Support and Water at Town Vault or PLAZA
Life Support from general Ecology[/i]
[/quote]
Aside from bug-hunting, my next goal is to implement road networks (user-placed for major highways, auto-generated for local connections,) and to work on a more visually interesting, and hopefully pathing-safe, version of terrain-generation.

#54

I have about half of the changes to terrain generation and road-networks implemented. I’d also like to use the road network to determine distribution of power, water and life support when the time comes. (I’ve also reverted to an older flora set for the time being, since the newer versions were more colourful/diverse but didn’t really ‘sit’ well with the terrain.)

At any rate, now that the basics are in place, I’m also open to suggestions as to what features people would like to see implemented first-

Housing and economic supply chains? Detailed construction and salvage?
Fog of war, exploration and combat? Different creature species and lairs?
Citizen life cycles and dialogue? Foreign trade, espionage and diplomacy?
Tutorial/tooltips or better UI? A video demo? Executable .jar/.exe/.dmg?

All comments/suggestions are welcome.

#55

Not much to report in terms of gameplay function, but I’ve gotten large-scale pathfinding and path-caching to work, which should substantially increase efficiency on larger maps with lots of citizens. (This also means that fine-tuning terrain-gen is less critical, since the pathfinding can handle island effects, but I might revisit it later anyway. I might try integrating it better with road-generation, actually.)

Next up: mag lines and shield walls. …and maybe offworld freighters for supplies and immigrants.

http://s1.postimg.org/4i1xw5ucf/small_town.png

#56

I download this and had a look the other day, then forgot to post about how amazing your graphics are. I love the whole look of this project. :slight_smile:

I will keep coming back and looking how its going:- but for now I need to read your whole post and find out all about it! Once again amazing art work!

#57

[spoiler]

[/spoiler]
Have you ever played star wars gallactic battle grounds? These /\ looks like buildings from gungans and confederation. :stuck_out_tongue:

They look very nice though.

#58

[quote=Vermeer]I download this and had a look the other day, then forgot to post about how amazing your graphics are. I love the whole look of this project.
[/quote]
Much appreciated. Was it able to run alright on your system?

[quote=Zhon]Have you ever played star wars galactic battle grounds? These /\ looks like buildings from gungans and confederation. :stuck_out_tongue:
[/quote]
I won’t make any particular claim to outstanding originality in terms of inspiration for art or mechanics here, but that particular game I never played. I’m not sure it’s a very close resemblance, though.

#59

I have just been having another game of your project. Firstly I am very appreciative of your art. I love Isometric art. I Like a bold decision you have made to not have shadowed faces on you buildings. This is very interesting- shadow can create a sense of visual clutter and your visuals maintain a clean bright feel to it due to this. It reminds me of making models in sketch-up without the shadow lighting on.

The more I look at your vegetation I like how the thicker outlines separate them spatially from buildings.

Did you create a specific colour pallet for it?

This is so impressive. The menu’s ran little slow for me, but I built several buildings and watched the people move about. I wasn’t sure what I was doing tho!

Cool code layout BTW. I would defiantly buy this game! :slight_smile:

#60

Ehh, I can’t really take credit for that. Adding shadows (including for the background) is something I’d like to do, it just complicated the production and rendering, and I happened on the vegetation outlines/palette largely by accident. If I ever scrape together the time/money, I’ll have 'em rendered properly in 3d, highlights and all. But I’m glad it worked out. :slight_smile:

[quote]This is so impressive. The menu’s ran little slow for me, but I built several buildings and watched the people move about. I wasn’t sure what I was doing tho!

Cool code layout BTW. I would defiantly buy this game! :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Thanks for that. The package layout was something I changed a few months back, and I think it actually made things much easier to organise. I might try slapping together a basic tutorial level (and I’ll see if something’s hindering the menu interface.)