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unmerged(323382)

Zeal Game dev
Jun 1, 2011
93
0
Hi guys,

We're marching onwards towards the next milestone over here. In one week it's off to San Francisco to meet the press, after that we're closing up on the alpha so there is a lot of things going on right now here at the Zeal office.
This week I'm thinking I should talk some more about the stuff you build in the game.
First some information about the design thoughts we have about the buildings.
There where initially three contending ideas;

1. Should the player build small buildings such as green houses and the likes of that, as you mostly do in real time strategy games, you may for instance build a barracks to train military troops.

2. Should the player build separate objects? So when the player want a dining room, he builds each furniture by himself, placing tables, chairs, lights and whatever he deems fitting into the room.

3. We also considers that the dwarves should build what they wanted, to have a system in place that made the dwarves basically play the game themselves. But as you might guess that turned out non-interactive as well as technically advanced, so yeah a bad idea.

You should be able to figure out (from the screenshots and concept art) that we went with the separate object deal. Meaning that the player gets to build chairs, beds and many other objects. These objects can be built from different materials, resulting in other types of the same object. For instance you can build beds from either stone, wood, marble, dreadstone.Each and everyone of these beds have different stats and grants the player different amounts of energy when slept in. This goes for most of the objects in the game, beside some unique stuff that can only be built with certain materials.

There is a lot of work going on this week so I'll have to stop here for now. I'll see you next week when I think I'll be doing the first of my Q&A, so if you have any more questions throw them at me.

some of the beds I mentioned above
beds.png

//Thorwaldsson
 
Yay, informations! :D


So there are no specifically designated rooms then ala Dungeon Keeper and such?

Does the player get to choose which dwarf gets which bed?
 
They don't have to be contending ideas; you could have a system which caters for both Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress styles of play, and both beginner and more advanced players, by giving the player the choice of just zoning an area as for example a bedroom, which dwarves will then build and place the furnishings of, or of directly ordering the construction and placing of individual items.

Dungeon Keeper and similar games have shown that using zoning does not have to make for a less interactive game.
 
Very cool!

Though I hope you're not going to have function completely overrule form - I want to be able to use a type of bed if I like the look of it, and not have to %100 rely on the gameplay effects of the bed!

Again with my endless comparisons to Evil Genius, but it did a room and item placement system really well. The "room" system gave your evil lair much more character, since the floors and walls of each room were distinctive.

How about a system similar to "smooothing" in Dwarf Fortress, where you can set dwarves to carve/modify the walls and floor of an area, and this would change the appearance and provide a slight boost for a certain type of activity.

For example having dwarves carve facades of battles on a wall and hang weapons up, would slightly increase combat training/whatever, in the immediate vicinity.

Hell, you could just simplify it with a broad "tapestry" item, where you choose what type of tapestry to weave, then hang it on the wall to privde a skill boost, increase the mood of your dwarves etc
 
hah yeah ! customisation!

also different dwarves should have different beds based on their class/rank/personality or somthing like that

edit: i hope there will be more about farming and food gathering next.. and will the dwarves need food every xx hour?
 
Perhaps this explains how you get new Dwarves. They probably come to your lair at set intervals based on whether you have the stuff available to satisfy them. Like proper quality of Bed, Food, and a Job for them.
 
Hi guys, just gotta tell you that there will be no Dev blog this week, I've been swamped with preparation for GDC and simply didn't have the time to make one this week. I do apologize and hope you understand.
 
Reading this, the first thing that occurred to me was that with all the potential materials and items in the game, this could end up being an epic amount of content. Have fun creating all that. :eek:hmy:
 
hope to hear all about both GDC and another thing about the game in your next blog.

Great work on the game so far. I wonder if we could see some actual game screenshots although I know the game is no where near completion some alpha stage screenies would be nice.
 
I would prefer separate objects more than rooms. This is mainly because of my experiences off of Dwarf Fortress, but it is a great system by itself. Letting the AI place objects on its own would be annoying because of bugs like where the AI places an object in front of a door which blocks movement.
But at the same time, I would like dwarfs to bring their own stuff to their rooms. I would like for each dwarf to have their own design for their rooms to fit their personality and traits. But these designs cannot be physical objects, but more of aesthetics that don't block any kind of movement. I want these to give boosts to dwarfs like if a dwarf sleeps in their own bed in a room with their own custom stuff, they could get an xp or production boost.
 
@Thorwaldsso

Could you fix the attached picture? Its just displaying a bandwidth exceeded message at the moment.
 
I'd like a a number of materials somewhere between the somewhat low Minecraft level and the headspinningly high Dwarf Fortress level please :D

Sounds great so far, but could you fix that pic at the end?