New Theme

From where the game was in my last post I knew I needed to figure out exactly how the player progresses through a level. What would be the factors when they were planning ahead, and how would they climb up the ladder to unlock and build new stations?

Here I found myself a bit stuck. I felt my ideas were falling between two stools:

• Townbuilding games, in which harvested resources are typically used to build new buildings (not compatible with the cooking/food theme) 
• Tycoon games, in which new buildings are unlocked through purchases and/or an abstract layer (e.g. unlock/research trees, levelling up, etc)

I’d originally started this project leaning towards the latter, but now felt that the former had more potential for adding strategic depth to short levels (again, Outlanders is one of my inspiration games for casual townbuilding).

So I decided to change tack and switch to a theme that could support harvesting resources for building. To bring a new angle, I chose the setting of a junkyard, where the player can harvest and recycle scrap materials to build with, as well as food leftovers to feed the population. I created a new spreadsheet for resources and buildings that would require the player to process primary resources from the land to get the materials for new buildings, and then use those to process new materials and/or sustain the population’s needs, etc, up to a couple of levels of progression.

I also realised that trying to solve how short, level-based gameplay works probably needed to take a backseat, and so decided to put that on the backburner and refocus on simply building it as a sandbox.

Overall, I didn’t quite get as far as I’d hoped in the timebox, and the current build is still very messy:

The functionality I added:

• Using resources to build (instead of just coins)
• Population needs (food, shelter) and then births and deaths based on these
• Resources spawning in a way that is more reflective of foraging/harvesting from the land

With those in place, I was back in the situation where the visuals also needed revisiting. There was a lot of hangover from how the previous theme had worked and the expected visual layout of that. For example, the game now needed to display a higher number of resources in storage, and there also needed to be a clearer representation of buildings.

I made a new mockup for the buildings and resources.

The next step would be to implement them into the game.