I’ve made a gameplay video talking briefly about getting started in the game, specifically getting water, extracting and gathering resources:

New Biomes

In this update I’ve focused on adding new biomes. This means refactoring some of the world generation algorithms to support a wider variety of features. Rivers can now experience daily and seasonal flooding. For each hour we can increase or decrease the level of water entering the map. For example, we can increase the water level during spring to simulate ice melting upstream and flooding the map. There’s a lot of flexibility in this system since these numbers can be set and tweaked in xml data files. In future when simulating coastal areas, I could use the same system to simulate hourly tidal changes.

20151225 River change

One of the new biomes is the Tundra. This is a very cold, flat biome where plants find it hard to grow. This was implemented by adjusting the daily temperature variations, height levels, resource distribution, etc in the data files. Then I experimented with the world generation until the numbers produced some nice looking maps.

20151225 Snowfall

One issue I had was with snow. In this cold biome, snow was a lot more frequent and it also melted in spotted patches. This constant snowing/melting didn’t look very nice in the previous version, so I had to rework the graphic effect to make it nicer.

20151225 Snowmelt

Besides tundra, I’ve also created a semi-arid biome. In contrast to the tundra, this one is hot and dry most of the year. They will each have unique animals and plants that make surviving a different experience. For example, in the tundra there are very few trees, so you will have to rely more on hunting animals for food and construction materials. Both of these biomes probably need more balancing in terms of resources and weather. This is a first pass at getting the functionality in for that.

20151225 Tundra

20151225 Semiarid

Extracting Resources

Speaking of functionality, I’ve made a slight tweak in the way resources are extracted. When you extract a resource, there might be different outcomes depending on the type of resource. So for example, extract a granite rock and there is now a 20% chance of getting a piece of flint instead of just a granite rock. The beauty of the system I’ve created is that I can apply this to almost any other action when designing the game! I can make starting a campfire have a 20% chance to create an uncontrollable wild fire (I won’t do that – but I could). Or maybe extracting a tree could have a 5% chance of spawning a Giant Sloth who was sleeping in it! The possibilities are endless.

20151225 Extract Tooltip

Anyway those are the main points for this month. Below is the changelog for the Alpha 12 Update:

Alpha 12

Features

  • Added exclamation marks to Stockpile panel when nothing allowed in pile
  • Added first pass of tundra and semi-arid biome
  • Improved snowing animation appearance and disappearance
  • Added fluctuating river heights over a year
  • Removed scenery colour changing in Autumn and Winter
  • Added spawn density for resources in xml
  • New sand ground type
  • Add ability to choose seed on world generation page
  • Harvest % chance success displays in tooltip
  • Added increase rainfall chance reward
  • Added random generator for world seed and tribe name
  • Added vsync to options menu

Gameplay

  • Animals move adjacent to water instead of on top to drink from it
  • Water flows downhill faster
  • Soil saturation flows downhill slower
  • Adjusted quartz rock spawn variables
  • Bear, tiger and mammoth carcass have specific butcher remains
  • Improved gravel generation
  • Height shown when placing meeting point
  • If snow present on cell, extracting task is slower
  • Improved river flow speed via teleportation
  • Bushes slow down movement
  • Sand slows down movement
  • Humanoids can swim over deep water
  • Extract now has probabilities for extra materials

Fixes

  • Major optimisation of fight or flight AI
  • Fixed great hunt achievement asking for too many animals
  • Fixed hut objects not registering in Stock panel
  • Fixed selection box not following walking human
  • Fixed humans not finding food inside huts when not already inside
  • Tweaked plant death animations
  • Fix not scrolling properly through tribe member list
  • Optimised water saturation
  • Optimised water flow calculation
  • Improved river generation algorithm
  • Animals no longer immediately drown in deep water
  • Fix resizing window causes loss of framerate limit and vsync
  • Fixed weather patterns starting on day 2 instead of day 1

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Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com