Food gathering works slightly differently now. Before it was too obvious which trees were fruit producing (like apple trees) and which trees weren’t. This led to a situation where the player is encouraged to cut down only the non-productive trees and leave the fruit producers. Eventually the trees would grow back, and the player could repeat the process until the entire forest was full of fruit producers.

This solution was too well-engineered for a game set in the Paleolithic era, and it wasn’t very fun to constantly be cutting down trees but trying to avoid/remember the fruit producers. So now, food harvesting has changed. When the harvest button is clicked in the menu, all the potential hexes that can be harvested are marked on the map.

Almost every tree and bush has a chance to produce fruit or seeds when it is harvested, and the type of produce varies depending on the species of plant. Some plants will produce nothing, and others will produce a random amount of food. The player won’t know what they’ll find until the harvest action is complete. They also won’t be able to tell which hexes will be fruit-bearing, so cutting down a whole forest will mean the loss of potential harvest locations.

After a certain amount of time you can harvest the plant again, unless it’s been cut down or died of old age.

Much time has been spent on admin lately, so not as many changes as usual for this update. The good news is I’m now working with an artist, so all the bad programmer art should disappear soon! Here are some of the new tiles:

• Object status effects – Last time I talked about items having abilities, which affected the item’s capabilities. I thought this was such a great paradigm, why not expand on it? Now all objects can have status effects such as [Wet], [Humid], [Warm] and so on. Different objects react to these effects in different ways. For example, food that is [Warm] will decay faster to simulate optimal conditions for bacterial growth. On the other hand, [Frozen] food will hardly decay at all.
• Expanded disease system – It didn’t make much sense for Stone Age dwellers to know what disease they had and announce “I have Malaria!” to you. To cure it, you just needed the right plant lying around and it wasn’t very fun. So I’ve changed the way sicknesses work. Now a sickness is made up of a set of potential symptoms (e.g Hypothermia is made up of the symptoms Confused and Shivering). When someone catches a sickness, there will initially be no effects. Over time, the symptoms will start to show up one by one and affect the person’s ability to function. The player may never be told what the underlying illness is, and have to find a way to handle the symptoms (this part I haven’t worked out yet – maybe the treatments can be randomised each game, discovered by a shaman, we’ll see what fits).
• Humidity and rain dynamics – I found a bug where the humidity would rise to 100% during Winter, did some more research and realised my simple model for humidity was way too simple. With my new, realistic calculations, the weather should be more balances and behave better. It should rain more often during the afternoon/night and hot, humid days are possible, depending on the amount of water vapour in the air.
• Humans feel “apparent” temperature – In real life, the temperature you feel isn’t always equal to the air temperature due to the effects of humidity. High humidity can make you sweat, even when the air is only mildly warm. To reflect this, I’ve implemented “apparent” temperature, which is a calculation based on air temperature and humidity. On hot and humid days, people are much more likely to suffer heatstroke. For example, 35°C (95°F) with 80% humidity will actually feel like 57°C (134°F). For the curious, here is a taste of the calculations involved:
• Did a bit of work on enemy raids, if other tribes don’t like you enough, they will appear on the map and rampage through your camp
• Graphical back-end improvements, now supports 64×64 pixel tiles and allows overlapping tiles
• Fixed UI scaling issues when zooming in and out
• Improved Query Panel for humans

Since last update I’ve been working on aspects that allow the player to organise a larger tribe more easily, as well as give more choice in how to manage the tribe.

Major Changes

• Open stockpiles – There are pits for food and racks for tools, and this worked well at the beginning. However as you your tribe progresses, raw materials such as tendons and bones tend to accumulate around the meeting point in a big mess. Open stockpiles are introduced to handle this. You can create an open stockpile from the Stockpile Panel and set what is allowed/forbidden to be stored in each pile. Then designate the hexes associated with that stockpile in any shape. This system allows for more strategic opportunities. For example, you could create a wood-only stockpile as a barrier and set it on fire to scare away predators, or suddenly melt a frozen lake to drown any animals standing on the ice.

  

• Hex maximum capacity – Hexes now have a volume limit, meaning you cannot store infinite objects on one hex. If too many objects are in the same position and their total volume exceeds the hex’s volume capacity, then some objects will “slide” to an adjacent hex. This effect is most obvious when butchering a large carcass with lots of parts, such as a mammoth, but you will also see the effect when piling too many objects in one cell.

  

• Diplomacy – Relations can change with other tribes depending on your actions. Right now I’ve only set up the foundations for this mechanic, you can either taunt or trade with the enemy. I hope to expand it with more interesting options in future that fit well into the game.
• Trade – To go with the new diplomacy system, I have introduced trading into the game. Trading involves bringing offered goods to a trading post, deciding what you want to receive in return, and then sending someone off the map with your goods.
• Rivers – Rivers are working! It took a while but they’re in now. Water flows in endlessly from the river entrance and flows out from the river exit points. I’m anticipating problems with the pathfinding since locations on one side of the map can’t be reached from the other, and will deal with them as they occur.

  

Other changes

• Melee damage and weight of object updates each day based on age
• Progress bars for actions such as cutting trees, constructing buildings, etc
• Wearables such as boots merged into Clothing class
• Food decay rate now affected by temperature / humidity

New crafting system – Using the workshop to build things was getting too clunky and confusing, so I decided to overhaul it. Now there is a crafting screen instead of a workshop menu. From the crafting screen, you can see all available materials near the meeting point, all build-able items and a list of current crafting tasks. It’s much easier to see whether you have enough materials to make something. To go with the new crafting system there are also Work Areas you can assign. These are just patches of ground where you want your people to actually do the crafting. If you don’t assign any Work Areas, they will just choose a random spot on the ground. Also you can build a tool rack where people will store unused tools, although I haven’t done the sprite for it yet and it looks just like the food pit.

New aggression system – I forgot to mention this in the last update, all animals now run on a new aggression system. Previously animals would either run away or fight when faced with a threat, and would do the same thing every time. Now their decision can be influenced by different factors such as distance to threat and current health. This leads to more dynamic interactions between animals. For example a lion can start off ignoring a nearby mammoth. If the mammoth wanders close enough to be considered a threat, the lion charges at the mammoth. The mammoth might try run away at first, but if the lion gets too close, the mammoth decides to also charge at the lion. If the lion gets severely injured in the fight, it then changes its mind and starts running away. There are probably going to be weird edge cases with this new system that I’ll have to fix up as they appear.

Timeline – Surviving is nice and all, but I felt like there was no sense of progression in the game. To help keep track of the efforts of your people, I created a timeline that records any notable actions or events that happened each day. The timeline can be accessed under the “Tribe” management screen.

Brains remember after saving – This one took a while to implement, I’ve been putting it off hoping it wouldn’t become an issue. Basically every time you loaded a game in the Alpha 2 version, none of the animals/humanoids would remember what they were doing and would recalculate their motives from scratch. Well the AI got too complicated for that, so now everyone remembers everything they were doing before the game was loaded.

Annual migration – On top of the usual animals wandering on and off the map, there is now also an annual migration that occurs during Autumn. Large numbers of certain animals will travel from one side of the map to the opposite side during this period (currently using Buffalo but that can easily be changed).

Snow and Ice – Snow and ice are able to form/melt based on temperature and weather rather than based on season. If your people get thirsty during Winter but all the water has frozen over, set a tree on fire and watch what happens to the nearby ice.

Other minor changes – Animals produce more materials when butchered, UI tweaks, tutorial changes, camera zooming and lots of bug fixes

The past few weeks have been spent working on getting an Alpha version up and running. It’s easy to gloss over the little things when all you want to do is add new features! The main menu has been cleaned up, UI positioning fixed, hard-coded values moved to XML files and dozens of other uninteresting things.

The main change to gameplay is the removal of woodcutter and gatherer professions, leaving only the hunter profession. A tribe member’s ability to perform a certain task is no longer based on what profession you assign them. Instead it’s based on the tools they have available on their body. For example, let’s say you designate some trees to be cut down. Anyone who is currently carrying an axe can cut down those trees, regardless of their profession. As long as you have allowed that tribe member to carry an axe and he/she can find one, they can do any axe-related activities.

The tribe management screen

The reason I have left hunters as a profession is so the player can control which tribe members to put into harm’s way. A non-hunter will flee from an approaching lion, while a hunter will stand their ground and fight back. You can even use the tool assigning system to choose the weapons the hunter is allowed to carry, and they will decide themselves which is the best to use. This tool-based system makes sense in terms of setting as well, since people tended to be jack-of-all-trades instead of specialists in the Stone Age.

If you’re interested in trying out the first Alpha version, please register at http://pokingwatergames.com