Hi everyone!
Felix here with another episode of our weekly blog. We’ve been hard at work the past few weeks. Gamescom is coming up, and we’re building a near-final quality demo to show to the press behind closed doors during the event. It’s a lot of stress but also exhilarating to see the game progress so fast.
I’ve been working on transferring the feature I consider my baby from the pre-production prototype to our development build: NPC Management! The idea for this feature came when I played the excellent Medieval Dynasty and was slightly disappointed when my villagers didn’t actually go into the woods to cut wood or hunt and instead made the resources magically appear in the stockpile. Then came the Bellwright steam fest demo (didn’t find the time yet to try the full game) and the villagers would actually go cut down the trees and transport the wood, but I felt restricted by having to assign them specific jobs. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a similar job system as in Colony Sim games like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, or even Prison Architect, where the player creates jobs in the world, assigns some priorities to them and some preferences for the villagers, and then have the idle villagers pick their own job?
Well, this is basically the vision of what the management will be in Lost Legions. Currently, we’re at what I’d call Tier 1 of this feature. NPC legionaries will roam about their assigned camp and idle about when there is nothing to do. The player can run around the world and designate things that they want transported back to the camp, trees they want to have cut down, or even plan out structures they want to have built or items they want to have crafted. Each of these orders will add a job to a queue in the camp, and the next free legionary will take on the job and attempt to complete it. Once they are done with one job, they will look for the next and go back to idling if there is nothing to do.
The main benefit here is that players can delegate the grind to NPCs while still being very much in control of what will actually be done (down to which tree exactly is to be cut and which one is not, for example) while at the same time not having to move the NPCs around different jobs if there are fewer of them than kinds of things to be done. Additionally, the planning feature enables you to design where buildings will have to be and what items you want to craft before actually having the resources. If you then also give your soldiers the order to gather the required resources while you are out exploring, everything will be crafted and built once you come back as the planned build order becomes active once the resources are there.
Now as for why this is Tier 1: currently, there is absolutely no UI where you can see what orders are active, what order they are in, and what an NPC is actually doing. Everything happens under the hood, but there still needs to be a lot of communication. I’m thinking task lists like Dwarf Fortress and priority lists like Rimworld at the moment.
Another problem is that you have to make each job individually. It’s fine for planning out a build order or a craft order, but selecting each tree that has to be cut down individually doesn’t feel fun after a while. There I want to work on order posts you can place in the forest that will define a radius of trees to be cut down… I need to test this out to see how it feels.
Something that already works and is pretty awesome is that you can run up to any soldier and draft him. Similar to drafting in Rimworld, the NPC will drop everything, put its current order back in the list, and start following you around and fighting with you. Very Tier 0 still, as currently you can’t equip them with weapons and armor, but the potential is there!
I hope I could give you some insight into this feature that I’m very excited about. There’s a lot of work being done on other great parts of the game at the moment, and I think we’ll have nice new things to show you all at Gamescom.
For now though: back to the pixel mines!
Felix