Tempest
The latest version of the demo is out now. It comes with a new scenario, and a new disaster! In this devlog I'll be detailing the changes to the game, plus the facepalm-inducing bugs that I fixed and lots of other small improvements.
Sea Change
As covered in the previous update, Critias Empire now has "scenarios". Each scenario has its own rules and balance, including different resources and buildings, all wrapped up in a bit of story. The maps are still procedurally (randomly) generated for now. I want to see how people find them before thinking about whether to support scenarios with pre-made maps.
Originally I was thinking scenarios would be a relatively easy way to keep adding fresh content into the game, as well as compartmentalise new features or ideas around game balance. However, it's taken a lot more effort than I anticipated to create just the two scenarios in this update, one of which is just a re-packaging of what was already in the game. I have a few ideas for more scenarios but if those also prove to take a lot of time to create, I'll switch focus back to adding features and systems.
Poseidon's Revenge
The new Bronze Seas scenario also comes with a new disaster. You can probably guess what it is from the blog title, but I'll leave the details of how it works as a surprise. I am though encouraged that it was relatively easy to implement.
I'm keen to get more feedback on how the disaster feels, as well as the Bronze Seas scenario balance, so please let me know in comments or find me on social media / discord if you have opinions. This will help me fine tune the disaster balance and also help with determining what disasters to add in the future.
Epic Facepalm
Right from when the demo first launched, players have been reporting strange behaviour and playing on weird map configurations. In the results from the bug reporting button I kept seeing screenshots of maps with tiny slithers of land, and sea, all forest and mountain and bonus resources on every single tile. Completely wrong compared to what should be being generated.
I decided to add in some extra fields/data to the bug reporting to help me find this and other issues. One of those extras was a date stamp. Since I knew people (and by extension, the local time settings on their operating systems) in the USA use a strange month-day-year format for their dates, I'd have to format every date to be in a neutral, non-regional-specific format, before sending the bug report data.
Doing this, it dawned on me that there are some other regional quirks, like some countries use a dot for a decimal place marker, and others a comma. That's when I realised what was going wrong with the map generation. Most of the balance data in Critias Empire is just whole numbers, but there are a lot of decimal points in the balance data for map generation. Turns out, when reading in the balance data from file, the decimal points in that data were being interpreted differently based on what language/location settings the player had. For example, 1.5 was sometimes being turned into 1 and a half, and sometimes into 1 thousand 5 hundred.
I'm kinda proud that my code is so robust it can handle ridiculously large numbers without straight up crashing (too often). But I even had this same type of problem occur on a previous game I worked on earlier in my career. So I feel especially stupid for not thinking about it earlier.
In any case, the bug is now fixed, and everyone can enjoy the maps as they're supposed to be. (Note: I actually patched this fix in in Build 45 around the start of June. But you will need to start a new game for the fix to work. It does not fix existing maps/playthroughs sadly).
Abandon Ship
One piece of feedback I keep getting is that there's no way to destroy a building (land use) except by hoping it gets destroyed in a disaster. Way back years ago, I gave players the ability to destroy buildings and recover a portion of the build cost. I found during early playtesting, often players would simply tear down their empire the turn before a disaster, hold everything in resource stockpiles that are unaffected by disasters, and then rebuild as they saw fit afterwards.
It was quite a smart strategy but removed the jeopardy of disasters in exchange for the player doing a lot of repetitious clicking. That wasn't a fun dynamic, so I removed the ability for players to destroy buildings.
However with the new Bronze Seas scenario, my QA tester at one point got stuck through no fault of his own due to being unable to destroy certain buildings. So I thought it would be a good time to re-open the issue.
Critias Empire now has an ability where you can "Abandon" a building. It stops producing and consuming, and also frees up workers, which can be handy especially in some tight squeezes immediately after a disaster. Abandoned buildings will decay over a number of turns until they are so dilapidated they are considered destroyed and removed from the map. This can anger the Gods in the process. Decaying buildings can however be repaired and reoccupied by paying a percent of their original build cost.
It's not an especially elegant solution, but it introduces some risk vs reward to the decision and hopefully won't be as obviously exploitable as what came before.
What's Next?
Last month, I burned out and became incredibly stressed trying to hit a succession of Steam festivals in a row. Around the end of May, I decided to withdraw Critias Empire from the June Steam NextFest, along with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden. Since then I've been much more relaxed and frankly healthier, mostly by actively avoiding optimising my work time. The demo will still remain online and available however, and my plan to keep updating it long term hasn't changed.
The next month will be a bit disjointed as I'll be visiting my family in the UK as well as pitching for a publisher and funding at develop conference in Brighton. However, I plan to get back to regular monthly updates on Critias Empire, so expect to hear from me again around the start of August.
Before all that, Critias Empire is in the "Made in Germany" steam festival! I moved to Berlin in spring 2017, so about 95% of Critias Empire's development has been here in good ol' Deutschland. I will eventually translate the game into German, but unfortunately not in time for this festival.
Development wise, having teased the Decisions system a few months back, I'm hoping to finally get down to implementing it. Doubtless there'll be lots of bugs to fix and balance tweaks to do from the new update, so I anticipate that'll take up most of my time on Critias Empire in the next few weeks.
Beyond that, Festivals and Predictions features are hovering near the top of the to-do list. However, the latter ties into the reworking of disasters I need to do, so may need to wait till I have a few weeks clear of other tasks.
As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (especially on Bronze Seas balance and the new disaster) you can always contact me or leave a comment!