News from the tavern #2 – LowPolis design & future

Greetings, citizens and travelers!

Yes, we’re still working on LowPolis. Remember that you can always reach us through the LowPolis Discord server – and you’re going to get a quick response there! ☝

Now, we need to share several important things with you.

Actually, we had to take a few steps back and make our choices concerning both how we work and how we think about LowPolis game design.

Oh, and also bear with us to the end. You will get a soft roadmap of what will be done in the game!

Approaching the project in an efficient way

Our vision of game development has changed. Given that LowPolis development is already a project that we do in our free time, the team needs to use that time to get the game done and ready for release.

So, we want to pursue three goals:

1. Publish the game within a reasonable time.
2. Bring in more content to the game.
3. Make LowPolis gameplay unique and meaningful.

Naturally, this also means big changes for you:

• We have to limit the updates to minimum but the current demo remains available.
• In return, you will get more progress updates.
• Hopefully, LowPolis can reach early access fast. :P

First, we are really sorry for dropping the updates. 😶🔨

At some point, the team even hoped to deliver smaller but more frequent patches. However, updates produce volumes of tasks that take away development time. We overestimated our ability to commit to that.

Please, be understanding because we need that time to make more than “another city-builder game”.

Let’s talk about how (and why) we want to change LowPolis itself.

Making a city-builder game enjoyable

It doesn’t take a genius to say that LowPolis feels pretty basic at this stage.

We came to understand that we should deal with a few design areas including game pace, strategic combat, meaningful expansion, and the game world beyond the city.

Slowing it down

LowPolis games are fast. The first minutes can be slow but you quickly reach balance. The only thing that currently limits you are resources. As soon as you crank up your production, you’re all set.

Let’s make the difficulty curve a bit sharper!

Persistent challenge

What about having enemies that attack you as you try to extend your city? Yep, that’s going to be a thing. In order to progress safely, you’ll need to spend some resources on maintaining defense.

Instead of big, epic, and chaotic battles, you will be focused on placing defensive posts strategically and micromanaging them. We believe that small frequent skirmishes can create many exciting moments throughout the game. (Think about the Settlers I & II in a way.)

Putting your citizens to use

Citizens now act mostly as a stat/multiplier that determines your gold income. Why not use them? So, to have workers and defenders, you’ll need to use your population as a resource.

Sense of progress

Having a massive number of new buildings unlocked at once can be either confusing or – again – too easy. To give you a chance of savoring your achievements, we’re looking to:

• Spread buildings across more city tiers.
• Introduce conditions for unlocking specific buildings.
• Tie some resources to different regions of the map.

Making expansion more strategic

At the moment, you don’t really need to give much thought to how you expand your city. Access to forests, stone sources, and rivers is fairly easy to achieve.

Your attention is centered on the city. So, what if we introduce some elements that make you think about what’s around the city?

Region-specific resources 

While thinking about game progress, we came up with the idea of making the environment more varied. Some areas on a map will have slightly different looks and properties.

You will need to expand there, so you can extract resources needed for building high-level buildings.

Multiple cities

For the moment LowPolis focuses on a single city. This limits your options of expansion to just adding building space to an existing space. You’ll still start with a capital city but you’ll be able to establish new settlements.

This way you’ll be able to obtain special resources either by extending your original borders or creating a production-focused settlement and create a trading route.

Living world

The map can become a place with life and history of its own. While building your kingdom you’ll discover independent settlements, unique structures able to boost you, and hostile camps.

‘Soft’ LowPolis roadmap

Now that we have some solid design directions, let's discuss our development plans. The things higher on the list will – most likely – come first.

1. Optimization of the way buildings and citizens work.
2. The new model of map generation and introduction of biomes.
3. Changing game focus from single city management to kingdom & cities.
4. Changes to the building system:
   1. relationships between buildings (buffs and debuffs)
   2. conditions for unlocking buildings (progress, the number of citizens, etc.)
   3. biome-specific buildings
   4. general improvements and fixes
   5. hireable workers
5. New resources, buildings, and city tiers.
6. New combat & city defense system.
7. Map locations that pop out enemies. :D
8. Generation of new map elements (independent villages, roads).
9. Resource trade system.
10. City-hall upgrades and extensions (mini buildings and boosts).
11. Micro events & spontaneous quests.
12. Map editor.
13. Scenarios with custom-coded elements.
14. Modular buildings (nice-to-have feature).

Naturally, new content and minor features may still appear along the way! 😇

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions? Wanna get friendly?
Become a registered citizen in our Discord community!