Development Showcase: Buildings
Hello, Caleb here, developer of Harwell. In this dev diary I'll be showcasing the implementation of various buildings in the game, along with their resources and the code which makes them run. I'll be showing you custom tooltips which give live information on net profit and dynamic construction costs, along with how the buildings operate and fit into the gameplay.
Please note, not all graphical assets are final.
Building Blocks
Building up the corporation will be the forefront of the gameplay. Miners for harvesting raw resources, factories for refining those resources into more advanced goods, and a market to sell them on.
See the market showcase here:
View game pageGraphics & Sound
This update one of the main things I've worked on is the feel of these buildings - the sound of placing them, how they show on the map, particle systems, and post-processing. Whilst some buildings share a lot of common traits - all of the miners for example are very similar, most of the other buildings have unique particle effects and lighting. I've tried to have particle effects create a sense of a busy world, with steel factories pumping out smoke, or windmills having little energy particles. Not exactly realistic, but it looks good. I think if I was going for hardcore realism there wouldn't be much life in the game apart from Mars dust and dust storms (yet to come).
I've also begun implementing sound effects. Machinery and mechanical whirs and clunks. I've heavily focused on atmosphere and how it feels to play with this update and I think it's paying off. I'm going to consider this as I continue with the updates as It's important the game is satisfying to play as well as fun. Some of the buildings have sounds made up of multiple effects to create something unique, and I've considered how they sound whilst playing so they don't irritate the player. In fact, they create somewhat of a rhythm which is a pleasing side effect.
Market Integration
I try to create a system which is as dynamic as possible, this means that each building will consume goods straight from the market, and if you don't have any goods stockpiled for them to build from, then they'll buy them from the market at their current market price. Don't have any money? The buildings will put this on debt. Don't worry, there will be a button to manually disable buildings to avoid racking up loads of credit against your company!
Those buildings will then produce those goods right into your inventory. What you do with them is up to you - stockpile to use them in buildings or construct new factories, or sell them at whatever their price is at that time.
Profit!
You'll have to choose your industry and building placement carefully - your buildings won't run if there isn't profit to be made. Every in-game ten minutes the buildings run their calculations, part of these calculations is net profit. The game works out the profit of the building on the fly based on the revenue it's making from the market price of the outputs minus the expenses incurred from the market price of the input goods. If the building's net profit works out to be negative, the building will shutdown production until it can make a profit again.
I'll try to give the player as much information as I can without cramming the screen full. One way I'm doing this it tooltips!
Custom Tooltips
As part of the building update I've worked on dynamic tooltips. These tooltips will display live information of a building's construction cost (based on market prices) and it's net profit (see above) along with show you exactly what inputs a building takes and what it will produce; this information will be in a custom tooltip for the build buttons on the right side of the market menu.
Performance
One thing I had to consider was balancing performance with reliability, which has meant I've had to consider how often the game calculates these values along with how often the tooltip updates. Rather than updating the tooltip every frame, the game works out the values on hover and updates the text on the tooltip. It's not ideal as it can lead to being shown outdated information, but it avoids having to do those same calculations every frame for example. The calculations are also done every in-game ten minutes, or real-life 5 seconds. I haven't done full benchmarking to find out the performance difference of doing those same sums every second for example, but I may adjust this in the future if the game can handle it.
Market Updates
There's been some minor updates to the market as well since the first dev diary, primarily integration with the buildings, along with the debt system.
Buildings will now buy and sell automatically, buying resources with debt if they have to. The player now also has more options when purchasing; holding Alt will purchase a good with debt, even if you have the money. This gives the player choice, maybe it's worth using a little debt for something you need now because you're saving your money for a shiny new steel factory?
Next, I'll be adding a 'pay debt' button to get rid of those pesky loans. I've also considered allowing players to buy buildings with debt, though I'm not sure if that is too flexible. I have a feeling it could be abused. I'll perhaps implement it when I'm closer to running playtests for the game.
I'll also be implementing auto-sell. This would make it so you don't have to sit and click through your goods to get them all sold off, sell straight to the market. We can't micromanage every bit of the company, can we?
That's all from me, thanks for reading, I'll see in the the next one!
Caleb