Game Maker Progress 40: Workers and Real-Time Game-Play

Hello everyone,

This week - two more critical components of the project have been implemented. These being the ability to add and remove workers to and from work-posts, together with the relevant code to ensure that if a population loses a member who contributing as a worker - the working population reduces; and the second component is that of real-time game-play. 

The ability to add and remove workers has been a major element of the project which has now been taken care of. Ensuring that the player does not somehow end up with a large amount of workers, when residential districts only have a few workers, as well as ensuring all the correct figures are shown, was a small head-ache. Thankfully - much of the work to ensure the system works was done with the concept build, which now only meant I needed to refine it and re-implement a new version. 

There does need to be a lot of adjustments to parameters based on the fact that game now operates in real-time. The real-time element in essence functions by having an 'Alarm' on-going during game-play which triggers a set of functions and resets the alarm; to signify time passing by. The way this has been implemented allows for a fairly simple way of allowing the player to choose speed - be it slow, normal and fast - which will be implemented along the line. This is a major change from the concept build - but a necessary one based on the type of game-play I am offering. Some of the feedback on the concept build described the game-play to be too slow; this might be the solution for this, this remains to be seen with play-testing however. 

There remains a few other tasks before I can begin refining the current build to a form to allow play-testers to test the game. More specifically is adding the Artisan District's functionality, possibly add the ability to save and load, and add the Production Menu to allow for better management of resources. Following this - I will be focusing my attention on the User Interface and the place-holder graphic elements. I will be keeping most of my efforts on the UI and the place-holder graphics in a more general form - for instance - attempt to have a single button graphic that can be modified using code and scaling to perform multiple tasks. 

Until next time,

Dylan