For this update I’ve been mainly working on a major overhaul of the diplomacy system. I think it now fits in better with the direction the game is going, I’ll talk more about that in a moment.
In the previous system we had sending scouts off the map, and buttons to perform “Actions” like taunting or attacking other tribes. It was becoming very complex from a programming perspective, and I found it wasn’t very engaging from a gameplay perspective either. Sometimes you would order a person to go scout, they would have another more urgent desire along the way (like being attacked by an animal) and it would cause edge case AI problems that took ages to troubleshoot. The interface required for diplomacy missions would also have required a lot more work as more Actions were added. It started to feel like a separate system from the rest of the game, rather than an integrated part of it.
Discovery
So I threw that away, salvaged what was still useful and built a new mechanism for diplomacy with neighbouring tribes. It’s a two-stage system that I think is pretty unique. The first stage is Discovery. This is when your tribe doesn’t know about the existence of other tribes. You have to do certain things within your tribe for these foreign tribes to notice you and increase their discovery level.
Each foreign tribe has a set of ‘influencers’ that affects how quickly they discover your tribe. For example, one tribe might have smoke from fires as an influencer, so the more fires you start, the faster their discovery level increases. Another tribe could notice there are less animals in the area due to your overhunting and decide to investigate (well, they don’t actually investigate but their discovery level increases).
Note that all these influencers are tied to things you can affect on the game map. It builds on the core game mechanics like starting fires, hunting, etc which I think works way better than the previous system.
Relations
Once a tribe’s discovery level reaches 100%, the second stage commences. This is the relations stage. The influencers that previously affected a tribe’s discovery rate now affect how that tribe feels towards you. For example, let’s say the number of fires is an influencer in the Discovery stage. Does that tribe feel inspired by your control over such a force of nature, or threatened by your pyromaniac tendencies? This will affect whether they like you more, or hate you more.
So that’s the big change in this update. I’ve also made various balance changes, visual improvements and the usual bug fixes. A full change log is listed below.
Alpha 11
Features
- Added x button to close management panels
- Sort stockpile panel by most to least stuff
- Add sleep vfx
- Added flashing for notifications when they appear
- Separated building menu into groups of buildings
- Added raindrop animation
- Added close window button to query panel
- Add movement speed increase reward
- Change blood layer into animation that slowly fades away
- Number of relation influencers increases as discovery level increases
Gameplay
- Achievement massacre wood requirement scales with prosperity
- Achievement Great hunt scales with prosperity
- In satisfying hunger, human will immediately seek food again if not fully satiated
- Reduced food supply contribution to prosperity from 5 to 3
- Reduced rate of influence shrinking when prosperity too low
- Added ability to deconstruct buildings using extract button
- Wild animals now avoid larger area around human influence
- Cooked meat provides much more hunger revival than fruit
- Overhauled foreign tribe discovery mechanics
- Foreign tribes have 3 randomly selected discovery mechanisms
- Overhaul relation modifiers with foreign tribes
- Foreign tribe relations based on likes/dislikes from discovery
- Improved raiding party AI behaviour
Fixes
- Fixed placing buildings task being cancelled by humans
- Added cooldown for failed tasks so not constantly reattempting them
- Properly space Objectives, active and news on right side depending on window size
- Fixed various problems with notifications
- Fixed if clicking on same notification twice, will not create another one of same type
- Fix stockpile panel scroll button not working and add columns
- Fixed human standing in water when idling and getting wet
- Fix multiple humans going after the same piece of food
- Fixed button array scrolling issue when over > 2 pages
- Fixed crafting objects even without required materials
- Fixed non-humanoid mammals not burning when on fire
- Fixed great hunt objective completion not triggering
- Fix not cooking some meats randomly
- Fixed incorrect image for vfx when loading game
- Fixed same reward choices all the time appearing
- Fixed make object task failing due to unset position
- Fixed crafting objects reset after Pokian abandons task
- Removed redundant scout profession
- Moved blood layer to between ground and object layer
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Twitter – ParsleyPWG
Website – PokingWaterGames.com
