Underfoot Queens Devlog 1: Maps, maps, maps
Introduction Hello there! I'm ElVillano, solo-developer of Underfoot Queens. I've been working on and off on the game for the last year and even though I try to keep people updated in other mediums (Discord&Twitter), I've been neglecting the steam page. But that's about to ch
Introduction
Hello there! I'm ElVillano, solo-developer of Underfoot Queens. I've been working on and off on the game for the last year and even though I try to keep people updated in other mediums (Discord&Twitter), I've been neglecting the steam page. But that's about to change!
A lot has been done since august 2022, albeit not as much as I would have liked, since I had to stop developing from march to june due to burnout. I'll try my best to summarise it for you!
World map
The world map is, like the local maps, procedurally generated.
Some key elements to the world map generation:
- Height: Useful to determine river pathfinding, oceans and hills.
- Humidity: Higher around oceans and rivers
- Temperature: It's a gradient from the poles (lowest tempeture) to the equator (highest temperature), with some randomness
- Biomes: Determined by height, humidity and temperature.
- Ecosystems: Determined by height, humidity, temperature and features.
- Features: Each feature is generated with different criteria, and they will influence local map generation.
Biomes list:
- Continental
- Aquatic
Ecosystems list:
- Meadow
- Forest
- Dense Forest
- Hill
- Coast
- Ocean
- Riverside
- Forested Riverside
- Hilly Riverside
- Forested Coast
- River Mouth
- Forested River Mouth
Features list:
- River: Rivers will have its origin at hills and go down in height until they reach the nearest body of water. Rivers can connect to any of the 6 tile borders. The tile's local map will share the tile's world map orientation.
- Hill
- Coast: Coasts will be generated as a border between land tiles and aquatic ones. As with rivers, they will share orientation with the associated local map.
- Forest: This will influence the local map's tree density placement and width.
To summarise, each tile will have a biome, an ecosystem and a combination of features.
Local Map Layers
The features described in the world map (Rivers, hills etc) needed a 3D aproach to map making. Before, the game already had two layers: the underground and overground ones. You built in the underground layer and did everything else in the overground. Your units would only move in the overground layer. That's changed!
Now, there are 4 different layers and units can move from layer to layer using slopes and other terrain elements.
These are the layers, from top to bottom:
- Overground+1: This is where tree branches, leaves and hill tops are generated
- Overground
- Underground
- Underground+1
Status effects
A colony can now suffer from status effects, which will have an effect on units recruited, buildings and the general population. For now the only status effects are related to humidity and temperature intolerances, with minor and major effects depending on the grade of intolerance.
New ant species
There are 4 new species. The difference between them is a bit shallow at the moment, with differences on aesthetic genes (How they look), expansion genes (Temperature/humidity tolerances, growth speed, etc.) and other already existing genes. What I mean by this is that I didn't add any species specific mechanic like I planned to do originally, so this is something to be worked on in the future.
The new species:
- Lasius flavus
- Crematogaster scutellaris
- Camponotus ligniperda
- Tetramorium Caespitum
Achievements
Achievements were a little lackluster before. I made a new statistics modules that records user actions, so now I can be really flexible with the unlocking conditions for achievements. Also, I've reworked them so there's an animation playing and they are shown in the center of screen instead of the top-corner like before. And there's a new section in the main menu where you can check your unlocked achievements!
PS: Right now each species besides the starting one needs to be unlocked by a hidden achievement.
New colony panel
I've added a new panel to centralize certain colony information. Currently it has these tabs:
- Population: You can check each population caste growth, deaths, etc. You can see 10 or so turns ahead and plan accordingly.
- Resources: Sames the population tab, but you can check each resource production/consumption and see predictions.
- Dna: This is the place to check your species genes!
New assets, pixel ratios and general graphic reworks
All these changes to map generation and the addition of the world map required a complete rework of most of the game assets.
I also had to rework most of the UI since the pixel ratios for icons, buttons and panels were very different sometimes so it made the UI feel less cohesive. I'm pretty happy with the results, although some of the concepts were harder to represent at certain pixel ratios / resolutions.
In conclusion
When I finished the prototype last summer, I felt like the map assets and systems I had didn't leave much room for adding new content. For example, if I wanted to add a tree dwelling species like the colobopsis truncatus, having only the underground layer as buildable wasn't going to work.
So I had to change the scale of the map, now a group of tiles can represent a tree and the tiles in the higher layer can can represent its branches, leaves etc.
Adding a world map also gives me the opportunity to finally use the humidity and temperature genes, adding negative status effects when colonizing a territory that your species is not adapted for.
So the mechanics added this year will allow me to create more intricate systems that can interact with each other, and that's a good thing in my book.
The future
Right now the game still feels shallow to me, it lacks content and obviously is missing a real threat (in the form of more dangerous wildlife and enemy colonies).
The next devlogs I post will be about more mechanics that for me are building blocks in what I want the game to be, like pheromones that would limit where you can build based on the size of your population, diseases so growing a high population colony will have risks besides starvation (that you will need to manage!) or a more in depth management of buildings and how population works them.