Posted April 29, 2024 by Jedai Saboteur
I’ve been spending a lot of my free time working on Empire over the last few weeks. Tightening up the core logic is my main goal right now. Some new systems have been added in and a lot of existing work has gotten much needed love.
People, Organizations, and Buildings can each have status effects. Status effects are basically flags. They don’t do anything on their own, but they do have an impact on Game Events & access to plots & activities.
Hospitals have been added to the game and agents can now assigned to the ‘Doctor’ department. When agents get injured, they can be assigned to hospitals, and they’ll heal much faster than they would otherwise.
Labs now have a purpose. Science has been implemented, and scientists working in laboratories will accrue science points. These points are used for science projects, which will open up new gameplay options, like plots, activities, and choices during Game Events.
People in the game can now inhabit apartment buildings. During world generation, people of each nation are housed before the game begins.
Other nations with leader characters have already existed. Non-Player nations are now controlled by CPU characters. At the moment, they aren’t very functional, but eventually, they’ll take necessary actions to protect their own people and resources, as well as take action against the EoE when it becomes too much of a threat.
The economy is partially implemented and there’s a game event at the end of each month to pay your bills (which currently consist of the infrastructure cost of all of your buildings and your agent’s salaries). At the moment, there aren’t penalties for failing to pay, but there is a status effect (stiffed) to agents who go unpaid. In the future, these agents may lose loyalty and eventually post security risks to the empire. Unpaid building upkeep is planned to lead to building decay, when building structure/health is more thoroughly fleshed out.
Resources have also been been heavily refactored. Science is accrued daily, if scientists are working in laboratories as mentioned above. Administrators working in banks add money to the Empire’s tills each day. Offices can be staffed with administrators to provide infrastructure. Buildings that yield resources only do so if people are working there, and their efficiency depends how fully staffed they are. If building’s staff has the right skills, further bonuses may be applied. Infrastructure is now also necessary to exploit the full amount of resources from any building. The larger the difference between your infrastructure output and use, the less resources you’ll be able to exploit, even if buildings are fully staffed with highly skilled agents. CPU nations are also as fully staffed as possible.
To support more plots and activities, both of those systems have been refactored. I’ve added a few new activities and given all activities a cost per participant, per day.
People have been reworked to have a better defined set of attributes and skills.
All of the game’s managers have been refactored to use singleton patterns. The primary benefit of this change is in saving data– I found I was running into an increasing amount of situations where processes that involved multiple major changes to game data resulted in incomplete updates and bugs. It wasn’t possible to update the game data incrementally. Now, that’s possible, and a lot of tech debt has been alleviated as a result. It also makes it more possible to decouple the main Game Manager and some of the other managers that were originally instantiated within and accessed through it.
There’s still a lot of work to do. There are a lot of quality of life changes that need to be made to the interface. The act of assigning your agents to various buildings can be tedious, as it sometimes requires multiple steps (ie, navigating to the agent, reassigning their department, navigating to the building, assigning the agent) and navigating some of the screens is more cumbersome than I’d like.
I’m doing my best to strike a careful balance between adding game features and updating the UI. On that note, I’ve lately been considering if having the game’s client and library code be separate is helping or hindering the overall project, but I haven’t committed at all (yet) to combining the two repositories.
What I know for certain is that a large Plot update is in the near future. Once enough work is in place to support a diverse set of plots (and their impact on the world), I’m going to focus primarily on those and activities for a while. I’ve been thinking about adding in equipment or gear, but I don’t have any hard set plans to add those in just yet.
A mobile friendly version of the UI is something I’m not ignoring, but I have firm plans not to implement a mobile version of the interface until the game is (version 1) done.
I need to make a road map…
That’s it for this post. I’m going to try to be a bit more consistent with updates.