In this devlog, we will discuss how population arrival works in our city and the housing system we have designed to offer an authentic and rewarding experience to our players.
Since the beginning of our game development, our goal has been to faithfully recreate the atmosphere and evolution of a city in Ancient Rome, from its humble beginnings to becoming a great metropolis that has nothing to envy to the capital itself. With all this, we aim to convey that feeling to the player.
When designing this, we have focused our efforts on creating a system that reflects a progressive and organic growth of the population regarding what you can offer to your citizens and how the inhabitants who are already part of it feel.
Thus, the player will feel that their city is alive and slowly prospering due to organization, rewarding the player's feats at all times.
At the core of the system is a population growth indicator that determines when new inhabitants arrive at the camp, who may arrive individually or in pairs and can settle if there are housing spaces available, contributing to the demographic growth of the settlement.
So, how does this indicator determine when the population arrives? To do this, we will consider three main aspects:
- Availability of housing spaces.
- Unemployment level of current inhabitants.
- Overall happiness of our population.
The rate of arrival of new families will naturally increase as long as there are available living spaces and we have a prosperous settlement. You must ensure to provide the basic and necessary resources at all times to have a general infrastructure in continuous operation where the needs of your citizens are met as they increase.
After building a housing area that will serve as the construction base for the first houses, access to food and water is their basic and fundamental requirement. With this, the newly arrived villagers will build their houses.
Regarding their design, we have introduced a new concept: desirability, in which houses will evolve and improve as we provide them with new required services and elements that increase desirability. However, urban planning must be carefully considered, as there are some buildings considered nuisances that decrease the desirability of the area. Therefore, a balance between them is necessary since they can block the possibility of leveling up, despite having the necessary services.
Here we can see an area of the city where the houses are very humble due to the fact that it is an industrial area.
There are ten levels of improvement for houses, in which the number of inhabitants who can live in them increases, as well as the minimum and maximum amount of taxes you can demand as a requirement for inhabiting them. The first necessary requirement to level up the housing area once built is access to a market and various types of food, leading to new gameplay dynamics such as ensuring to maintain an efficient market network where all kinds of necessary food can be supplied. The last requirement to reach the maximum level of them is specifically having a library nearby, access to wine, and a high level of desirability, combined with all the requirements of all previous levels. Only then can your citizens enjoy housing worthy of a true patrician.
But there is still an important leveling factor within the game design to consider. As a player, you cannot provide a housing area with all the necessary requirements to reach the maximum level, as these buildings will unlock as your city grows as you advance in prestige. But this is already a new system we will talk about another day.
This would be an example of a wealthy area of the city, where its inhabitants enjoy all possible comforts and have the best housing.
In summary, the population arrival and housing system in Citadelum not only seeks to offer a realistic experience of building and managing a city in Ancient Rome but also provides players with a dynamic and rewarding challenge. From planning urban distribution to caring for the well-being of your citizens, every decision you make will have an impact on the growth and prosperity of your city. From the development team, we are very excited to see how players will face these challenges in Citadelum.
