Hello Citizens,
Today we will talk about the systems that define the gameplay of Circadian City. Most of these systems will be enabled for modding as well but we will talk about the vanilla game on this post.
Mood System
If you played other RPG's or Life Simulation Games you should be familiar with need bars you see on the mainscreen of these games. You need to refill these bars before they get empty otherwise you die.
We did this part a bit more complicated. We have need bars that you need to keep on the positive and we have status bars that you need to keep on the negative. Overall we call them mood bars / system
4 mood bars (positive) are: Hunger, Energy, Social and Happiness
1 mood bar (negative) is : Stress
These moods are further broken to sub-moods that have effects on their parent mood. For example Energy is broken into Phsyical and Mental Energy. Sleeping can refill both but working drains mental energy and running / exercising drains physical.
The image you see above is our first draft of the UI
Depending on the percentage of your mood bar there are also various states. If your character's happiness is full, he is in the "full of life" state so his crafting skills and socializing is improved for example.
You will be able to see on detail UI panel all the things affecting each mood stat and a log for the past 24h
We want to work on a more dynamic system for moods so you can create your own moods for your characters in modding if we can make it. That's just an idea right now. Let us first see the feedbacks to the current flow of the game.
Quest System and Items
We started on working on the quests as hard coded pieces but later on, it seemed like a very cool idea to develop a layer where the content team can write their own quests without the need of programmers. This seemed even more cooler when we realized this would be a great tool for adding their own content to their mods for our community.
We decided to use a console to quickly create these quests, place objects on the map, create items, define the behaviour of these items and create dialogues + dialogue options. We don't know when this system will be available for modders as it's still on development but it will be available somewhere during the Early Access.
Crafting/Building System
Items in Circadian City are classified regarding their behaviours. There are item classes like trees, ores, vegetables, tools etc.. You can for example use an axe on a tree type object or harvest a grown vegetable with hand. Furthermore we can apply tags to these items for other uses. For example we can create an item that will have an effect on "blue" items. A blue item can be from many classes.
Crafting tables are built for making a list of items, in that sense, the cooker in your home is a crafting table where you can craft food items and the expected behaviour of food items is their edibility. Thank you Mr. Obvious.
When we will enable the crafting system to modding, we expect the universe to explode.
Upcoming in Later Posts
Some other systems that will be explored on later posts are:
- Character system (Now you can customize your pixel art characters yay!)
- Interest / Skill System
- Emotion System
- World Generation in Dreams
- Day/Night and Seasonal Cycles
Stay well citizens, we're gearing up for Early Access !