Devlog #13
TL;DR - This week’s UI updates gave the game a whole new life - using resource trend stats and chat notifications, the current feature set is finally manageable - it’s now fun and challenging to stabilize and expand your population. We’re moving into combat, and have a lot of design to tell you about :D
This Week
This week we pretty much did what we said we were going to do - UI/UX stuff. The game was hard to manage - the mechanics were all there but it was impossible to tell who was doing what, who was starving, who needed a job, etc etc. We had a large list of possible fixes for these issues, but in the end, we didn’t actually need all of them. Below is a list of features we finished this week.
Grouping Help
Select all workers of a building (left click)
Select idle (i)
Construction sites show percentage on enable
Settlement health increased
Selection across the world
District Stats
Resources
Resource trends
Population
Beds
Chat
Colored Usernames
Notifications in chat
With grouping help, chat notifications, and district stats, the towns became much more manageable and even fun to manage. Using the stats, you can analyze your current output, and move small amounts of workers around to maximize production of certain resources over others.
Design Interlude
Before we go into next week’s agenda, it might help to get some background on our thinking. So as many of you know, Avalon is a city-builder / RTS hybrid living in a huge persistent world. As many of you also may happen to know, this is a genre of game that has been theorized for some time now, boasts a slew of failed projects, and even suffers from existential design problems. How could anything go wrong? Create a giant sandbox world where people can build and go to war (imagine RTS style mechanics) - 2 major issues arise:
More frequently online players out-pace and beat less frequent players
New players are easily decimated by veteran players
This is all falling on top of the fact that even RTS in its current form has a mountain of design failings - there are so many degenerate tactics that hold the game back from real organized strategic war in the first place. The reason I’m bringing this up is for anyone doing your homework, I want to lay out our plan to fix these giant issues. Among games who have attempted this there are 2 major camps
Nerf and slow down combat so much that players have time to react even when not frequently online and make some safe zone for new players
Fuck it (These are just hardcore wasteland games with learning curves worse than DF, no complex emergent systems, and huge amounts of required play time)
We aren’t doing either of those things - #1 is boring, #2 is basically not even an answer. We have a small tweak we think can fix it all: cooperation. Take that MMORTS wasteland you were just imagining and change one simple mechanic - players can start towns together / join others towns / form alliances with other towns (nations). So how do our issues above dissolve? For issue #1, in a world where the sides of a potential battle are not single players but large groups of players in many towns, an interesting phenomena occurs. At a certain nation size, the mixture of hardcore, midcore, and software players start to normalize to the same ratio for all nations. This fixes the frequency issue, and given that the marginal utility of total group size is also capped in some simple way (just make groups unwieldy after a certain point) there will be a fairly leveled playing field for all nations. As for issue #2, in an alliance based world, new players would not only be welcomed but begged to join different nations - they offer more player power, more production power, and fill necessary roles in more advanced player’s skill trees. Say advanced players needed lower level resources in mass quantities to fuel their productions - now huge amounts of new players can be supported in the ecosystem. So what about war? With large, equally matched nations, the sandbox stops degenerating to the classic RTS issues. Imagine a real world scenario where two towns existed for the sole purpose of destroying the other - the strategies you see in RTS wouldn’t be so uncommon. Since the Avalon sandbox is emulating a more realistic scenario - the ongoing existence of large allied bodies - war becomes much more realistic. You aren’t going to war to destroy other players, you’re going to war for resources, for strategic reasons. You have huge alliances that could swing in or out of your favor based on your decisions. When alliances do go to war, it’s not over in 15 minutes - there’s many towns in a large world to attack, occupy, stabilize, and integrate into an ongoing nation. With all these added balances, Avalon becomes free of a lot of issues traditionally seen with these games.
Next Week
Our plan this week is to get combat more balanced, stabilized, and less chaotic. Towns need more protection - so we are going to add archer towers. One of the most unwieldy parts of combat is that your entire workforce suits their job to fight right now. By adding trainable melee units and dipping the health of the normal villagers, we are hoping to fix this issue. Melee units will auto attack, villagers will run inside and hide. Melee units stay at a post, villagers wander around. Attacks will be comprised of melee units and defenses will be comprised of archer towers and other melee units - no one will leave their jobs, and the defense has a fighting chance now. This is the last thing we are planning on adding before open development - so I hope you’re getting pumped to start playing!
Weekly ToDo
Repopulation
Purchase new villagers from town center with resources
We are changing this to tend slightly more towards RTS and keep units manageable
Archery - man workers at posts to fire ranged attacks
Sentry Towers
Archery from Town Center
Melee Training
Barracks - uses resources and guys working there slowly train up their melee skill (stars) and you can take them out whenever
These are the only guys that will auto-attack, they can’t be put in normal work sites (you can still attack with villagers, it’s just not auto)
Essentially, these are our first real RTS units
Weekly Fancy Stuff
In other news, we finally dropped some of those new building models in and fixed the lighting and shadows. Below is a before and after of just the lighting changes - pretty sweet huh?
Then we added the new buildings
Then we made construction models for all of that so no ore white boxes on the ground!
See you next week!