Hi everyone and thank you for taking the time to read this.
First things first, patch 0.3 is nearing completion and is now available for public testing. In order to partake, please right click on "A Game of Humans" in your Steam library, select the "Properties..." menu and then go to the "Beta" tab.
Come to think of it, I am not entirely sure how clearly the goal of the project was stated when we first went live. So let me do that now; The goal of A Game of Humans is to create the deepest possible colony simulator and god game hybrid.
Depth sounds nice and all, but what does it mean? The character rework in this patch is the first answer to that question.
What's in this patch?
The official name of this patch is "The Peoples Patch". The goal was to take what we had in 0.2 and do two things; solidify the gameplay systems so the rest of the game can be built on top of it and deepen the character simulation so we could start approaching what has been the goal all along, characters that feel as alive as a character in The Sims.
The meat of this patch consists primarily of two things;
- Character rework
- Information display (it should now be a lot easier to understand what is going on)
Characters now have;
- Traits
- Personalities
- Voices
- Thoughts
- Skills
- Stats
- Records
- Relations
- Inventory (though more items still need to be added, such as clothing made by tailors)
This patch also adds the foundation of the economic gameplay, namely supply & demand based price fluctuation. This is going to come into more effect as off map traders and taverns are added.
The new personality system allows us to simulate things way beyond what could be done before. Look at this fellow for example, Orvaldur. A friendly and social guy, but not very organized nor intelligent. This is reflected by the stats, derived from the personality. Orvaldur will never be an expert at what he does, but he will be liked by most others. Unfortunately, this also means Orvaldur will be easily fooled by others (this is where the future crime update will come in, the feature I am perhaps most excited about)
Why did it take so long?
Patch 0.2 was essentially a bunch fixes and small changes. Patch 0.3 was going to be the next step in the evolution of the game. As we began the implementation we slowly came to the realization that we had more work to do than we originally estimated. An estimate of 6 months turned into twice that.
I now understand why the game we set out to make has not yet been made, turns out the AI is really tricky to get right. The AI present in the previous versions (including the character model that drove the AI behavior) simply wasn't up to scruff, it didn't produce the depth we needed it to.
What's happening now?
From this point on patches are going to be smaller and a lot more frequent.
If you download the beta, you will notice that the faith powers are gone for now. They are going to be making a grand re-entry before the official release of patch 0.3. The faith/god powers are where the meat of the gameplay experience is going to be. The intention is to build a system that rewards the player for paying attention to the simulation, manipulating the behavior of the Humans to produce the perfect village.