So the biggest thing I’ve been working on during my off time this past week (and a chunk of last week) has been what I call “Pops”. Sims is probably trademarked? Cims is specific to Colossal Order games (Cities in Motion, a.k.a. CiM). So I went with Pops, short for population. It’s used in Paradox grand strategy games too, most prominently in Victoria, but I figure it’s the most generic name possible.

Every town needs people, whether it’s a hamlet or a city. In a happy and shiny way, they’re the soul of a place - a town is nothing without people. In a grim way, people are the town’s most important resource, and Iron Village is a game all about resources!

Pops are the game’s simulated people. In the current implementation, they can do one of five different things (i.e. their states):

1. Idle (i.e. do nothing)
2. Walk to Work
3. Work
4. Walk to Rest
5. Rest

What a wonderful and meaningful life they have! Pops prefer to have their own home to sleep in, but can technically exist without one - while it's not yet implemented, they will have the option of resting in other places, such as the train station. They'll also take whatever job is available, they're not picky. They work until they run completely out of energy (or you demolish their workplace), then go rest and free up their job slot.

Pops are kind of a resource as well - trains (when implemented) can bring you more pops, as well as take them away if they don't have homes.

That just about covers Pops, here's a video showing all of this in action. (As you'll note, clothes have not been implemented, thankfully cold weather is not a thing in this game.) Here’s a video of them going back and forth between work and home:

Except, that isn’t quite the end of the dev diary. You see, I began working on trains this week (that’s a later dev diary), and realized that while these pops don’t need food or water, they make them as resources, which feels odd. So here’s some more feature creep! Originally my plan was to make a game over the course of a few months (i.e. the equivalent of one month full time), but that isn’t quite happening.

Right now I’m thinking I’ll give the pops water, but not food, at least for the first prototype. (That’s another future dev diary topic!) It won’t be too much of a stretch to add that to the state machine, and hopefully that’ll avoid more feature creep. Once and for all.