Posted March 22, 2025 by Acurna
This version 0.2 is more of a progress report / development build and not balanced or polished. Just to show what I got done in a bit over twice the game jam time. My original idea was somewhat out of scope but this 0.2 version is roughly my original idea. Plus some optional stuff, minus issues still present. Many things like audio and settings are still missing, other things are more important to figure out how to do and to see if the gameplay works.
Originally I wanted citizens that transport items, work at buildings and that fulfil their needs like sleep and eat but there was no time during the game jam. The 10 day voting period meant that we can't upload any new files, so I wanted to use that time and date as kind of a soft deadline to get something closer to my original idea with citizens done.
I got citizens done and it was way more complicated than I thought. Quite a complex task management system with buildings that have demands and offers and tasks that get created by matching a demand and an offer and potentially splitting it into multiple tasks to limit how much one citizen carries and then those getting assigned to idle citizens...
I also reworked the inventory and item system to use item types in a dynamic list instead of the four hard coded ones. So some very important ground work. Unity is quite limited in what kind of data it can show in the Inspector unless you extend it. I found the "Serialized Dictionary" to display C# Dictionaries which is a great help: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/p/serialized-dictionary-243052
The amount of code quite precisely doubled. From 1750 lines in the game jam version to 3470 now and that is with a bunch of refactoring, unifying and cleanup.
There are still a lot of things to do and many issues. I have over 80 open ones written down plus vague long term ideas. I guess I just continue working until I have a more solid and polished base and then ask playtesters what they think. I'm also thinking of changing the name, I keep forgetting it and it was chosen to be quite descriptive and hinting towards the game jam theme.
Currently there also seem to be a bunch of performance issues. Both low FPS in general and lag spikes.
This is (probably) the last version that uses fully free assets. I bought some things on sale on the Unity store... I hope they work and improve the graphics a lot.
Currently the free stuff used is: