Game Maker Progress 47: Designing the new Village to Town System

Hello everyone,

The last week has not been very productive for a number of reasons - between other obligations and similar reasons; as such I used it to stream-line a few processes to make future work simpler and easier. For example - I organised the sprite and image files I use for the tiles and structures within Krita - the software I am currently trying out to use for graphic creation - in layers in a way that will make it easier to create new structures, export it's relevant images, and import them into Game Maker Studio in as few steps as possible.

I have been thinking a lot about a major change I want to implement in the way that towns are built. Previously - players simply built districts that perform various functionality such as housing the population or refining material into other resources. This was always meant to change - and I have been taking steps into figuring out how to implement the early stages of the player's civilisation building with village, that will eventually lead to the creation of towns, and their subsequent expansion using districts.

As it stands - players will begin by constructing villages which will be a amalgamation of the current existing Residential, Mercantile and Artisan districts. Once a village reaches around 100 population - it can expand into a town. Expanding into a town changes the village tile into a Capital District - and also unlocks the ability to build the various other districts adjacent to it. In a way - this gives towns a more later game feel, and also provide a more authentic way of growing and developing - rather than what is usually done where the player creates the structures when, and where they might fit. This will require more planning by the player - since the districts will need to be built adjacent to one another - and it is a possibility that a bad placement in the early game of a village could mean that the town will be smaller in size, and will require the player to build an extra village to expand instead. On that note - it is worth mentioning that the player will be able to build more villages which themselves will expand into other towns - I have yet to decide how to handle interaction between the various towns that a player might possibly decide to create. 

This will be a fairly major feature of the next test-build, which I hope to have completed before the planned play-test date. 

Until next time,

Dylan