Hey all,

I know I’ve already written a post for today, but I decided to write about the work I’ve done on Small Gods in the six days since my last post. I’ve also decided to try and enforce a slightly more rigid outline of what’s been done in order to make these kinds of posts easy to read in the future.

I will, however, be keeping this update short due to a lack of images (when I get my first models and/or my logo back I promise I’ll spam pictures of them everywhere :D)

New Features

Happiness

• Worshippers now have a happiness stat. If this stat gets too low they will not work though they will wander around the area.
• The average happiness of the player’s worshippers is stored by the game manager for use in other scripts.

Immigration

• New worshippers will now arrive at the player’s city every 2 minutes (value subject to change).
• The number of worshippers that immigrate will be controlled by the average happiness of the player’s worshippers. The lower the happiness the fewer people will immigrate to the player’s city.

Building placement

• Buildings can now be rotated left and right prior to placement in order to improve placement and (eventually) the look of the player’s city.
• Mines (and future buildings) have/can have their placement restricted to certain locations denoted by the presence of a game object with the appropriate tag and on the appropriate layer.

Terrain

• The terrain has a (terrible) desert texture applied to it. This will change in the future when I find/make some decent textures.

Misc.

• Camera height has been lowered in order to improve visibility.
• The FPS mode now allows players to walk up 90-degree slopes.

 

Bugs

Building Placement

• Due to the way I’ve handled flattening terrain rotating buildings can produce some odd results once the terrain is flattened. I’ll need to examine potential fixes but it’s not a catastrophic problem right now.

AI Navigation

• Due to the results of the terrain flattening system (it produces a 90-degree angle) navigation is sometimes an issue once the grid graph is redrawn. In order to fix this, I’ll need to smooth out the height increases/decreases which should be a relatively simple math problem.

 

Future Plans/Planned Additions

These features and changes are planned to be included in the game by the end of the current sprint (August 28th).

Building placement

• I need to fix the terrain flattening system so that it works properly in conjunction with building rotation.
• I need to ensure that the terrain flattening system produces a gradual rise to a flat surface rather than a sharp, 90-degree plateau in order to prevent the navigation system from messing up.

Happiness

• I will need to adjust the values of happiness gain/loss in order to improve playability.
• I need to re-examine how happiness is gained/lost. Right now it’s a constant drain due to tiredness/hunger but I’m thinking that a flat modifier would be better as it’d let me add better unhappiness features.
• Add civic improvements to improve happiness.

Immigration

• The immigration formula will need to be modified/replaced in order to give greater variability in the number of immigrants that can arrive in each immigration wave.

Emigration

• AI will be given the behaviours necessary for them to leave should they stay unhappy for long enough. If a player is unable to provide enough housing, food, or civic improvements to their citizens, this will cause them to leave.

Mission Editor

• Create a basic finite state machine using the Mecanim system for use as the beginning of a mission editor.

 

Final notes

I know that this is a really short update without any interesting gifs, videos, or pictures, but I really felt like I needed to give you guys an update as to where everything is and where it’s heading in the future. I hope to have something exciting for you guys next week… And by ‘for you guys’ I mean for me, and by ‘something’ I mean emigration and a finite state machine. Programmers are weird.

 

Bye!