Hey everyone!
Last week we made good progress on the tiling system, did some further work on the shader for rivers and waterfalls, and started working on a procedural shader for tree barks (the title image is one of our shader creations).
We are experimenting with procedural bark for a couple of reasons: Having a shader instead of a texture will mean that we can implement a variety of moss or weather conditions for the trees based on their location; it will mean that we should be able to have different bark on the same asset based on location; and it will remove a resolution limit on larger assets. The latter is most notable currently with the polynesian palm trees. While we love their scale in the game and their presence in the jungle, the bark looks quite pixelated up close. Additionally, when different levels of LOD load in, we are working to make the transitions smoother.
Considering all of these are still works in progress and rather technical, we want to use this blog to also talk about some higher level considerations of ours. In particular, we want to discuss the depth and balancing of our production chains. At the moment, the amount of buildings we have is the minimum we considered to be viable to make the game work when we planned it out at the start of the project. Production chains are rather limited, and most of the early buildings are rather expensive while also giving you a really high rate of return.
When John and I have been playing the game as a team, we tried to specialise on certain aspects (exploration vs base building), which has made us realise how few decisions the base builder has to make in the early game before their economy starts to bring in money. Considering the starting capital of 2k and the cost of e.g. a farm and seeds, it generally isn’t possible to place more than one field before you run out of money - which is obviously not a great way to start the game.
With that in mind, we are planning to adjust the balancing of the early game (wooden tier) to being much cheaper while also having less of a payoff. This should also mean that you need more space and more villagers to produce goods compared to the latter tier production facilities, which will give a nice incentive to upgrade and will mean that villages will have to grow quickly from the very beginning.
Until next week!