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Updates in v2:

- Painted different terrain below mountains and forest.

- Added lava (lava is always so... much fun!)

- Placed some buildings and structures.

 

Updates in v3:

- Placed two towers \o/

- Added more accessible border pieces for monster spawning.

 

Note:

If you are starting in stupid location like on an island, just restart the map.

 

 

Download [This version will only work on "inDev11 Unstable 5" or greater]:

http://www.file-uplo...rdheim.rar.html

Boss Llama's Basics

 

Greetings all! I figured I'd try my hand at writing up an intro to playing the game in its current form, InDev-10-14-2014b Forgive the length, but there is a lot to cover. If you're familiar certain aspects, you can probably skip whole sections. Items that might be of particular interest are the Structure Guide appendix (section 7) and Hotkey appendix (section 8).

 

I welcome any and all corrections, questions, and feedback! I'm far from perfect and am still new to the game myself, so if you know something I don't know, I'm all ears!

 

 

1) All things change

 

Please bear in mind when reading this document that it is written about a very specific version of the game – InDev-10-14-2014b. At the time of posting, this is the current version, but this can change quickly! Some things are likely to remain the same, others not so much. I’m not 100% sure how fully certain mechanics have yet been introduced, such as efficiency based on happiness, but what follows is what I believe to currently be the case.

 

 

2) The Interface

 

When launching the game, you will start with only the topmost interface, and a box asking you to place your village center. Left, right, and bottom interfaces become available rapidly. These interfaces are the way you issue commands and gain information, and are important to understand.

 

Top: The topmost interface is your overall town and game summary. You do not issue commands with it. In the center is the time of day and sun indicator, showing where you are in the world’s day/night cycle. To its left are three buttons, and to the right are two columns of data.

                The left button: Shows a villager in front of a red house, and is your Main Menu button. Presently games can’t be saved, so it only has “Exit without saving” as an option. As more system options become available, look for them here.

                The middle button: Shows a crowd of villagers, and toggles a list of all villagers in your control. A mini portrait on the left shows what each villager is presently doing, while level appears in parentheses on the right. The list is sorted from highest level to lowest. Males are in blue text, and females in pink text.

                The right button: Shows a map, and brings up a full-screen map of the entire play area. Buildings, both claims and unclaimed (see “Placing Village Center” below), show up as bright blue. Villagers are tiny green dots moving around, and yellow areas indicate resources piled on the ground. Wild resources such as food crops (orange) and crystals (blue, red) show up as well.

                The left-hand column: This data has your resource indicators. On top is wood, in the middle is stone, and on bottom is food. The number show is the sum total of all of that resource that is currently in your possession in any state. If you mouse over the number, a small set of three digits separated by slashes will appear (such as 360/155/3). The first number indicates the quantity of that resource stored in buildings, the second is the quantity of that resource lying on the ground, and the third is how much is currently being carried by villagers.

                The right-hand column: This contains the data on your villagers themselves. The top number is population, the middle number is average happiness, and the bottom number is average hunger. If you mouse over the population number, you will see two digits separated by a slash (such as 24/2). The first indicate how many working adults you have, the second number is children. For the happiness and hunger numbers, higher is better. Low numbers, especially for food, may indicate imminent danger or problems in your town

     

Left: The left interface (“Work” tab) is your harvesting command interface. There are seven buttons.

                Size Control: The two arrows with a number in between control how large an area your commands apply to – click the arrows to adjust. The area can be as small as 1 block, and as large as a 30x30 square – 900 blocks at once.

                Brush: Changes the shape of the area you give orders for. Options are circle, square, and filleted or chamfered squares.

                Assign Work (x4): The next four buttons are used to assign workers to collect a given resource. From top to bottom, they are wood, stone, crystal, and food. Select the button in question, click over the appropriate type of resource, and the villagers will go to work.

                Unassign Work: The bottom button with the big red X through it is used to cancel a work order assigned above. Be aware that cancelling the order will not prevent a worker from going to that location if they already got the call, but it will prevent them from starting work on arrival.

 

Right: The right interface (“Tiles” and “Objects” tabs) is your build menu. Objects is currently empty, so all activity is in the Tiles tab. There are nine buttons here, for the various categories of structures planned for the game. Two of these are empty  (“Decorative” and “Flooring”) and have X’s through them, and the last one is a Debug Mode tool for testing. The other six buttons are Farming, Housing, Lighting, Resource Gathering, Resource Storage, and Walls. Clicking each button will bring up a new set of buttons representing each building within a category. Click the arrow in the up left to return to the first menu. For a summary of costs and purposes of each building, please see “Structure Guide” below.

 

Bottom: The bottom interface is your selection data panel. It shows information about whomever or whatever you have selected with your cursor. It shows building information for a selected structure, or villager data for a selected villager. Villager information is detailed below. Structure Data is generally as follows:

                During Construction: It will show the resources required to build the structure, and construction progress. It expresses these as pairs of numbers divided by a slash, alongside an icon indicating the type of resource in question. A picture of a log accompanied by “10/30” indicates that 10 logs have been delivered and are awaiting construction, and a further 20 are required. This number can be somewhat tricky, as the second half then begins to count down as work is performed. A structure that is 10/30 can have workers hammering away at it until it is 0/20 before more logs are delivered. The same 20 logs are still needed, it’s just that now none are on site awaiting workers. When the second number reaches 0 for all resources, work is complete.

                Resource Storage: A complete building that is capable of holding resources will show how much it is holding, and how much it is capable of holding, on the left side of the panel. For example, a lumber shack will have an icon of a log accompanied by a pair of slash-separated numbers, such as 20/50, indicating it has 20 of a possible 50 logs stored.

                Workers: Buildings that require employees will have the familiar slashed pair of numbers in the top center of their interface, alongside a hammer icon. Small green and red + and – symbols are present, and allow the player to increase or decrease the number of workers assigned to a building. If the number is 0, the building isn’t used. Maximum workforce isn’t required at this time for efficient use of some buildings (such as farms), but can be used to speed certain tasks along. This is as close to manual control of workers as the game comes at present, as you can force workers (by assigning them to jobs like “Lumberjack” or “Food Hauler”) to prioritize certain types of tasks. It is very important when you first place your Village Center to remember to assign your workers to it! Without assignment, they wander aimlessly.

                Residents: Houses will have a resident counter in place of a worker counter. It indicates in the same way, but is not manually controllable at this time.

                Range: A number alongside a pair of green arrows, indicates how many blocks away from the building are considered to be within buildable range.

                Portraits: Small portraits on the right of the interface show the current activities of all employees/residents of a structure. Mouse over to see their names. In the future, one will be able to access stats and to directly select from here, but at present it is not possible.

 

 

3) Meet the Villagers

 

First and foremost, let’s take a look at who the villagers are in the game. Villagers are your basic workers and functionaries, much as you might find in any other town building game. While they have occupations, you cannot control them at an individual level. Work is assigned to the community on the whole, and based villagers working in appropriate occupations will be assigned to perform the tasks required.

 

Stats: Villagers have a number of statistics visible if you select them. They are:

                Health: In red and indicated by a heart, if health hits 0, the villager will die. Villagers heal gradually over time, if they have their basic needs met.

                Hunger: In green and indicated by a turkey leg, if hunger hits 0, the villager will begin rapidly taking damage from starvation. A villager will seek out food at their home, if they have one, and barring that, may run to collect food that grows wild nearby. They will not raid a farm to feed themselves, and can easily die amidst fully grown crops if food delivery hasn’t occurred.

                Energy: In yellow and indicated by a lightning bolt, energy represents how tired a villager is. As the number gets lower, the villager will need to sleep to recover energy. A villager with a home will go there to do so, and will recover energy rapidly. A homeless villager will collapse where they stand and sleep in the fields.

                Happiness: In blue, and represented by a peace symbol, unhappy villagers (lower numbers) will slack off, work slowly, and won’t mate. Homelessness, hunger, and overwork will contribute to lowered happiness in your population. A sufficiently happy villager will be a better worker, and will seek out a mate with whom, eventually, children will be produced to grow your town’s population. Children will have the surname of their parents.

                Marriage: If a villager has found a mate, the name of that mate will be shown in white, indicated by a ring icon. The surnames will also change to match that of whichever partner was more recently generated by the game.

 

Attributes: Villagers also have a set of attributes. I don’t yet know what precisely these indicate or if they have an effect on game mechanics – please report if you know for sure. These attributes are Strength (red), Dexterity (green), and Intelligence (blue). Villagers also have a level, written in white and indicated by an upward-pointing arrow. As level increases, so do the attributes.

 

Icons: As villagers work, you will see various icons popping up above their head on a regular basis. The include:

                XP: Blue text indicating numbers such as “XP +7” to represent experience earned from carrying out tasks. This goes towards increasing the villager’s level.

                HP: Appearing in red text, HP represents Hit Points, or health. It typically moves up or down in 1 point increments as villagers heal or take damage. If you see a villager running along spraying blood with a chain of “HP -1” appearing over his head, he’s probably starving to death (at this point). Once mobs and magic are added, we will likely see numbers far larger than 1 appearing.

                Peace symbol with an X through it: Blue symbol, red X, indicates a decrease in happiness for any number of reasons – see Happiness, above.

                House with an X through it: A small yellowish thatched hut, with a red X. Indicates that the villager in question is homeless – more housing is required.

                Attributes: Attribute abbreviations followed by a number, such as “STR +1,” indicates a change in the attributes of a particular worker.

                Hammer: Seen above builders working on structures, a small hammer followed by a +1 indicates that the villager has just contributed 1 construction point to the structure being built. Each point brings the structure closer to completion, with the total number of points required being the sum of the resource cost of the structure (ie 35 wood and 10 stone requires 45 points)

                Rings: Always seen in pairs, villagers with small white ring icons rising above their heads have just gotten married. They will attempt to live together, and may end up having children.

                Hearts: Always seen in pairs, villagers with red hearts above them have just mated, yielding a small chance of a pregnancy in the female.

 

Reproduction: A couple that is sufficiently happy and has idle time together will mate, and may become pregnant. If this occurs, there will be status text on the female’s stat box indicating that she is pregnant. She will be less efficient a worker during this time. When the child is born, you do not yet receive any notification, but will see that your population counter has increased. Children use resources, but cannot work until reaching adulthood. The reproduction rate of even a healthy town is presently very low, but the reproduction mechanic has been identified as one that will be balanced in future updates.

 

 

4) Resources, and Placing Your Village Center

 

When placing your village center, it is important to consider where you are putting it, and not just slap it down willy nilly. In the current InDev, without mobs, defense isn’t a consideration (though it certainly will be in the future!). Instead, look at the resources available to you before placing this all-important first structure

                Wood: Wood is used in  nearly every single structure in the game, including the center itself. You’ll want to make sure you have sufficient woodland near your start point to support the construction of your starting buildings, as a long walk to reach it will slow things down and can doom your town to starvation.

                Stone: Stone is used for most buildings, in increasing quantities the “better” the structure is. You don’t need as much stone right off the bat, but you will need some if you want to create decent houses and farms. Expect stone to be especially in demand near town after mobs are added, when it can be used for high-end walls

                Food: Food shows up as small patches of carrots growing in grassy areas, often up against trees or mountains. It is critical that you have these an accessible distance from your starting point, as they are presently the only way to get your farms working! Do not set your villagers to gather food until you have at least one, and preferably several, fully built farms. If you do, they are liable to eat all the food and leave none to plant your farms. If this happens, given the current pace of hunger in the game, you will starve to death.

                Crystals: Not yet used in the game, do not worry about these in this build. In future builds they will be used for magical structures and potions, with different powers existing for different colors. At present they are nothing but eye candy.

                Open Land: Not a harvestable resource, but vital none the less. If you build in a tightly confined area, you will not have space to build the buildings you need until you clear out all the trees/stones in the way. Simply put, you do not have time to do this – you will die. Each building you build has a Range characteristic, indicating how far it spreads your influence (buildable area). If there isn’t space within range of your current buildings, you can’t build. Being encircled at some distance isn’t necessarily bad, as it provides resources, and when mobs are introduced, defense, but having enough open land to build your center and your initials houses and farms is critical.

                Pre-existing Structures: Scattered throughout maps at the start can be various structures, left behind by previous unfortunate villagers. If you build close enough to them to bring them within your Range, you will take them over. These structures exist in a damaged state and will take some amount of resources to repair, but it is only a small fraction of the cost of building one from scratch. The right pre-existing structures (houses and farms) can give a new settlement a big shot in the arm. Just be careful not to build too close to something you don’t want… we can’t yet cancel or pause build orders once issued, and villagers will spend precious time and resources on every structure in your Range, whether you want it or not.

 

 

5) First Structures/Build Order

 

I won’t get too much in to strategy, as I’m sure there are many different things that work, and part of the purpose of testing is to find as many of those things as possible. Still, to reduce frustrations for new players, I’ll suggest the following:

                Farms: After placing the Village Center, the very first thing I suggest is a working farm. Preferably two. Large farms are far more efficient uses of space, and if you have the wood available, a better idea. When the farms are finished, immediately assign some farmers and send them to gather food. Get those farms planted! Once the farms are planted, you can reduce the number of farmers and reassign them to builder jobs at the Village Center.

                Houses: Once the farms are planted, housing is the next imperative. Homeless villagers are unhappy, unfed, and less rested. The Small Shack is the best deal currently, offering the best ratio of housing to space to cost. Be aware of future balance changes. Make sure you have enough housing for all of your citizens, and if you hope to expand that population, best to have the house available first.

                Other Buildings: Once you’ve got stable farms and housing, you can play around without danger. Most of the other buildings serve limited purpose in the game so far, but will become important as additional features are implemented. Consider your priorities, and build accordingly. Experiment, have fun, don’t worry too much! Saving games isn’t available yet, so go wild and don’t fear the consequences.

 

 

6) Assigning work

 

Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to assigning gatherers to collect resources. Because the game is using a first-in first-out system of tasks, if you assign a huge swath of forest before clicking on a couple pieces of stone that are in your way, the stone won’t be cleared until the forest is fully chopped. Basically, select things in the order you want the villagers to do them. A few others things to be aware of:

                Dot system: When you assign something to be collected, you will see dots appear on top of the resources in traffic light colors – red, yellow, and a green. Green means that the resource is accessible, and a worker has been assigned to come collect it. They are on the way! Yellow means the resource is accessible, but nobody yet has the assignment. Red indicates that a resource is not presently accessible – something else will have to be cleared out of the way before an assignment can be made.

                Storage: At present, resources last forever on the ground. This will change, and storage buildings will be required if you want to make good use of what’s available to you. The workers in storage buildings specialize in collection of their specific resource, and it has been suggested that they will have a bonus to collecting it. Place storage buildings near the resource you want collected, for extra efficiency.

 

 

7) Appendix 1: Structure Guide

 

Structures by build category, listing cost, footprint (WxH), and useful data

Farming

                Small Farm: 30 wood, 7x7, Up to 4 employees, grows 6 food at a time and holds up to 25

                Large Farm: 60 wood, 9x7, Up to 8 employees, grows 12 food at a time and holds up to 50

Houses

                Tent: 15 wood, 4x4, Up to 4 residents, stores up to 12 food

                Small Shack: 35 wood/10 stone, 4x4, Up to 8 residents, stores up to 24 food

                Small Hovel : 70 wood/20 stone, 5x5, Up to 12 residents, stores up to 36 food

Lighting

                Small Wood Torch: 10 wood, 1x1, casts light

Resource Gathering

                Lumber Shack: 25 wood/25 stone, 8x6, Up to 8 employees, holds up to 50 wood

                Lumber Mill: 50 wood/75 stone, 11x7, Up to 16 employees, holds up to 150 wood

                Stone Shack: 25 wood/35 stone, 8x6 Up to 8 employees, holds up to 50 stone

                Stone Masonry: 50 wood/100 stone, 8x9, up to 16 employees, holds up to 150 stone

Resource Storage

                Food Storage: 40 wood, 7x7, Up to 4 employees, storages up to 75 food

Walls

                Wall (Stone): 15 stone, high-end wall built one square at a time

                Wall (Sturdy):  5 stone, mid-range wall built one square at a time

                Wood Wall (Basic):  5 wood, simple wall built one square at a time

 

 

8) Appendix 2: Hotkeys

 

Until the ability to assign your own controls is added, I thought it best to list the hotkeys I’m aware of to help folks navigate:

Screen Movement: Use WASD to move the screen around. Alternately, hold right click and drag.

Selecting: Click the primary mouse button

Deselecting: Press the Esc key

Zoom In: Press Keypad +

Zoom Out: Press Keypad –

Toggle Fullscreen: Press F12 to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode.

Toggle Grid: Press G

Screenshot: Press F2 (saves in “screenShots” subfolder of your RPC directory)

Visual Performance Overlay Toggle:  Press F3 (places box around each entity, provides performance and game tracking data in upper left)

Welcome to the all-new Retro-Pixel Castles website! I've taken a short break from working on the game to put together this little community website for all of us to use. Feel free to register and poke around! This page will be your one-stop-shop to get all the bleeding edge information about RPC.

The site is designed to be a fun, entertaining place to chat not only about Retro-Pixel Castles, but also about gaming and game development in general. You're more than welcome to head on over to our forums and chat about anything you like. Also, our forum is setup with many awards and incentives for being an active participant in the community that will be displayed in your profile. For example the first 100 registered accounts will get a "The First One Hundred" banner and if you're a member of JGO with over 20 posts, or a member of the SixtyGig commnunity you will also be awarded a community banner for coming over here and showing your support!

Please enjoy the website, and be sure to let me know if you have any trouble! I look forward to all of you joining and starting up a nice little community here.

Thank you for visiting and I'll see you on the forums!

Click here to view the article

InDev 19 development has started, InDev 19, like 18, will be bringing in loads of new content and game changing mechanics!

This updates primary focus is on adding new defenses, roads, spawn systems and AI to the game. It will also flesh out many of the mechanics added in InDev 18. As always, the road map just highlights the biggest changes, there will always be additional smaller changes along the way.

If you have any requests, be sure to post them in the comments. Let me know what you want, and how you want it to work! You might just find it sneak into the next patch.

InDev 19 Road Map
Roads
There will be 5 tiers of roads, you will have to start with tier 1 and work your way up to 5. For example, if you wanted a Tier 2 road, you'd first have to create a tier 1 road and build a tier 2 road on top. The roads will be built and maintained by new workers from a new building.

• Tier 1: Basic path. Villagers will automatically generate a basic paths in the ground in high traffic areas, offering a minor speed boost. The paths can also be built manually, for no resource cost, and function as the foundation to build roads on.
• Tier 2: Wood path. Costs 1 log resource per tile.
• Tier 3: Cobble and wood path. Costs 1 rock resource per tile.
• Tier 4: Board and cobble road. Costs 1 board resource per tile.
• Tier 5: Board and cut stone road. Costs 1 stone resource per tile.
• Note that because you need to have the previous road built in order to build the next tier, bringing terrain from nothing to tier 5 actually costs 1 log, 1 plank, 1 rock and 1 stone per tile.
• All road types will decay over time, requiring basic maintenance. The more traffic a road gets, the faster it will decay.
• A new "Road Worker" building will be added to build and maintain the roads. The workers will automatically repair the roads as they start to decay, and facilitate any new road construction you assign.
• More road tiers may be added in the future when more complex resources are added to the game.

Golems and Other New Defenses!
Several new defense buildings will be added, including the new Golems system.

• Golem Building - A basic defensive building that will generate Golems that will act similarly to guards, but are renewable. Meaning if one dies, a new one will eventually take it's place. These can be placed in heavy combat areas to keep monsters at bay and hopefully in range of your towers.
• Boost Tower - A tower that boosts the abilities of other towers!
• Healing Tower - A tower that very slowly heals any friendly in range.
• Bullet Tower - A fast shooting, low damage "machine gun" like tower that uses the same ammo as the sling tower, but can shoot over walls.
• Sniper Tower - An extremely slow shooting tower with very high range and damage. Likely will use the same ammo as the Bow Tower.

New Monster Spawning System!
A complete rewrite of the monster spawning system, opening the door for future changes.

• Monsters will now spawn anywhere on the map that is not inside the village.
• Monsters will only be able to spawn in open space, so they won't be trapped in tiny pockets they have to dig their way out of.
• Monsters types will spawn based on the type of tile they spawn over, setting up map-specific monster spawns in the future.
• Monster spawn rate settings will be added to the map, setting up for map difficulty settings in the future.

Assistant Buildings
These may not all make it into InDev 19, they will be added as time permits. If they do not make it, they'll be pushed into InDev 20!

• A tavern - This building will be a fun place villagers can go to relax. It will boost happiness, and while in the tavern, encourage people to interact (and thus, partner up for mating)
• A church - A place to boost happiness, and while it's being used you'll also get a boost to your influence bar. The more people there, the more influence you'll gain on top of the usual gain rates.
• A hospital/clinic - You can assign villagers to work there and they'll become "field medics" who will run around healing fellow villagers. Later, this will also be a place pregnant villagers can go to give birth and their child will get some bonus experience for being born there, rather than at home or on the fields.
• Schools - A place where children villagers can go get educated. Children will gain experience when they visit the school, so they might get to start their adulthood a few levels higher than what they were when they were born.

Auto-program mode that would read my mind and make all the cool ideas "just happen".

OVERVIEW:

Retro-Pixel Castles is a very brutal game if you don't play your cards right, this guide is designed to get you up and running. It's not all inclusive, but it'll get your village to a sustainable state!

 

THE MINI-GUIDE:

The first few days of Retro-Pixel Castles can be daunting, but the first one is probably the most critical. You will find yourself with absolutely no buildings, and you'll have to setup shop quickly. You will first need to find a place to place your Village Center.

 

 

Placing your Village Center is simple, just click on the dropdown on the top GUI over on the right hand, and select a place you'd like to drop it. Look for a place with food, trees, rocks and crystals! You'll want to be near all of these in the future.

 

 

Now that you've placed your village center, you can assign villagers to it, by clicking the + and - buttons on the GUI. (TIP: You can quick-assign all available villagers by right clicking on +.)

 

 

Once your villagers are assigned, you simply need to select resources to collect. The village center requires both wood and rocks, select the assign work buttons for them on the left hand GUI and select some resources you'd like to gather. As soon as they are selected, your workers will head over and start the process!

 

(NOTE: Once the Village Center is complete, your villagers may decide they want to repair any abandoned buildings in the area if you're near any. In most cases, it's probably a good idea to let them complete those buildings first, but some may require additional resources you don't have access to. If you want to stop them, you can pause construction by clicking on the building and hitting the pause button.)

 

 

Once your Village Center is completed, you should probably build housing. You can select housing on the right hand GUI. You won't have the correct materials yet to build anything other than a few tents, so go ahead and place a few down. The builders will then go collect the resources needed and put them together for you!

 

Next, you'll need a farm to feed yourself. Back on the right hand GUI click on "Farms" and select a farm you'd like to build. You can build either of the two current options at this time, so pick whatever you want.

 

Now that you have farms built, you can start harvesting food. But you need workers assigned first, so be sure to unassign some workers from your Village Center, and then click on the farm and assign them there. Once assigned, you can click on the Assign Work (Food) button on the left GUI and select some food on the map for your farmers to go collect.

 

Finally, you should probably build yourself a Guard Outpost and assign a few guards to it. You'll need these guys to defend your villagers while you work. Like the farms and housing, you can find the guard buildings on the right GUI. Just click "Defense".

 

 

That's it! You're on your own now. You'll probably want to build yourself a Lumber Shack and Stone Shack next, get a Crystillery running and maybe get some magic buildings going. But I'll leave you to figure out the rest.

 

Good luck!

Finally! After two hard weeks of completely rewriting the main menu, InDev 10 is here! Most of the changes were behind the scenes in preparation for the upcoming save system. Most of what you'll notice is some bug fixes, and of course the new GUI. Enjoy!

 

Full Change Log

- Added mouse scroll wheel zooming.

- Completely rewrote theMain Menu GUI.

- New Map Pack system added, you can now bundle your maps into map packs, instead of everything all being in one folder.

- You can delete maps (and map packs) within the game now.

- Added a Credits page (Note: Not all Backers are listed yet, and it still needs cleaned up)

- Brand new fonts.

- Selecting a terrain category in the map editor no longer auto selects a terrain.

- Renamed "Gathering Buildings" to "Harvest Buildings"

- Fixed a bug that would cause the map editor to crash when moving/deleting farmland.
- Fixed the grab tool, it now works correctly.
- Fixed a bug where if you dismantle a building that has resources, but has not been worked on yet, it would delete the resources.

- Moved all the user maps to the "Developer's Choice" map pack.

- Updated all the old user maps to their latest versions.

- Added user map Altaria, by Kingroka.

- Added user map Eduin's Rest, by Tattagreis

- Added user map Island Group, by Galahir950

- Bunch of other small fixes/tweaks.

 

Enjoy! Don't forget to report any bugs you find!

Hey all, thought id make a post for a map I made, plus any I create in the future.

 

Finished:

 

Bradleys crossing. (DOWNLOAD <- CLICK MEH)

http://i.imgur.com/zfG2vBp.png

 

Version 2 is online and ready to download (the link above should be updated)

 

Updates:

-Rocks have gravel under them.

-More Crystals

 

In-Process:

 

Crater: Download to test: CLICK ME HERE, NOW!

 

Desert of Death: Download to test: Unavailable!

 

Non-working (pics only as they are tests I did.)

 

Forgotten City

 

http://i.imgur.com/48qmrlg.png

Doesnt work, Villagers go NUTS trying to repair buildings. I always liked survival in a city ever since the Night of the Living Dead custom map on WC3, so a city map is one that I tried here.

 

Mountain Home (yay Dwarf Fortress)

 

http://i.imgur.com/ZwB59j0.png

Takes to long to mine, so no DFness . Simple as that. wanted to give a bit of a siege (heh) aspect to the map, and maybe have monsters spawn in tunnels too, but alas is was not ment to be.

 

Last: If the images are to large (As I have a large screen) ill compress them.

This post reeks of something. Sounds like you had fun and maybe got bored? That happens, you know? What I'm really curious about, is how you can propose that the game has "became a failure", despite the fact that it has an above 90% approval rating recently. I'm really puzzled on how you came to this conclusion on the behalf of the 90%.

On a side note, your "developer husband" (that was a joke, right?), should have a look at the actual code before accusing something of having "amateur programing". Get a grip, and have fun in your future games!

The next major patch will focus mostly on and fleshing out the defense elements of the village. All the current towers will be getting upgrades in-line with the existing upgrade system. I will also introduce some light upgrade branching not seen in any previous buildings, where you can select what kind of upgrade you want in the tower's final upgrade stage.

For example, the Bow Tower will feature the base building, and 3 upgrades. The first two upgrades will simply boost the towers base ammo capacity, damage, and firing rate, but the final upgrade will let you to select between 3 element types, allowing your maximum upgraded bow tower to launch fire, ice or lightning arrows at your enemies depending on your personal preference.

This patch will also introduce a new damage type system adding resistances and weaknesses to all villagers, monsters and golems. Skeletons for example will be highly resistant to piercing damage (arrows), but highly vulnerable to crushing (stone balls). Making the bow tower mostly useless, but the bullet and sling towers highly effective.

But that's not all! In addition to all the new tower upgrades, brand new towers will also be added to the game! So check out the road map below for all the juicy details.

Due to the amount of towers I am planning this patch may be broken into two major stable patches (InDev 26 and 27). It mostly depends on the development time needed to add all of the new towers to the game.

If you have any requests, be sure to post them in the comments. Let me know what you want, and how you want it to work! You might just find it sneak into the next patch.

InDev 26 Road Map

Towers Upgrades

• All existing towers will be given 4 upgrade phases, with the final upgrade allowing you to pick from various elemental types (Fire, Ice, Poison, Acid, Lightning, etc)
• Fire Bolt Tower will be redesigned into an "Elemental" tower, doing generic magic damage at first, then upgraded into a fire, lightning or ice bolt tower later.

New Towers

• Longbow Tower. A new variant of the bow tower with exceptional range and damage, but very slow firing.
• Spray Tower. A new variant of the bullet tower, very short range, extremely high rate of fire, but very inaccurate.
• Recombobulator Tower. A tower designed to heal nearby golems.
• Haste Tower. Increases the movement speed of all mobs (Monsters and villagers included) in the area.
• Static Tower. A very short range, very low damage area of effect tower that will damage all hostile mobs in range.
• Boost Tower. A tower that will use essence to "boost" nearby towers firing rates.
• Chain Lightning Tower. A tower that does pure electric damage that jumps from one mob to the next.
• Sticky Tower. Does no damage, but will slow down anything it hits.
• Banish Tower. Teleports a hostile mob away from the village.
• Attract Tower. Fetches nearby items on the ground and pulls them to the tower.
• Flame Tower. Does fire damage in a small area, burning everything in its path.
• Frost Tower. Similar to the flame tower, but fires a cloud of ice. Does low damage, but slows down the enemy.

Damage Type System

• Everything in the game will be assigned a damage type (or types). Bow towers will do piercing damage, bullet towners will do crushing damage, etc.
• Currently planned damage types are: Blunt/Crushing, Piercing/Cutting, Fire, Ice, Water, Lightning, Acid, Poison, Disease. (Suggest more in the comments!)
• Many mobs will have resistances or vulnerabilities to various damage types. For example, a zombie may be highly resistant to disease and poison, but vulnerable to fire. While some mobs may be immune to certain damage types all together, like the Fire Elemental will be completely immune to fire, but extremely vulnerable to ice. The specter may be immune to all physical damage, but extremely vulnerable to all elemental damage.

Feedback.

 

Pre-Feedback Disclaimer: Yes I know a lot of these things I will talk about are already known. However I feel it is important to give a comprehensive overview of what I saw in the game. I also already know a lot of these things will 100% be fixed in near future patches, again its just a comprehensive list of feedback and opinon.

 

The Good.

 

• Art Style
  • Art Style is mostly perfect and looks great. I would suggest doing a clarity pass to make sure that stuff is easy to differentiate. I mistook flowers for food crops on my first run for example.
• Premise
  • ​The premise and set up of the game is also fantastic. From launching the game and going to the world map it was very exciting and fresh. I was really looking forward to exploring the game when I started it up, which is a good thing especially when you consider I bought the game as an afterthought.
• Optimization
  • ​The game ran great, even when I was getting to the point of hitting the double digits of days on my 3rd/4th run. Very little slowdown or artifacts. Only a 100-1,000ms pause when autosaving which was very manageable.
• Tooltips
  • ​A lot of people under-rate tooltips and information windows in games. But for me its very important that I have the information I need available to me. While there are certainly areas to improve, overall it is heading in the right direction.
• Interactivity
  • ​Its great that you went in the "God Game" direction for the game a little bit by giving you spells and abilities you can use to interact with your villagers and help them. Considering most of these sorts of games are heavily hands off it helps smooth out the gameplay bumps that can arise as a result of that hands off nature.
• Gameplay
  • The basic gameplay systems(building, harvesting, spells) all feel quite nice and work well together to create an interesting foundation for an experience.

 

The Bad.

 

• Spells
  • Some spells are redundant, E.G. Grab interaction with banish/summon from limbo etc. Mostly needs a mechanical cleanup and finishing touches before it can be critiqued in a more complete state. Flame spell is a bit useless. 
• Villager Ai
  • ​You're probably aware of most of the issues surrounding villager AI, but I would just like to reiterate that waiting for them to run up to a building and do the last tap to complete it is a bit silly, as its often some villager miles away thats holding up the process. Theres also their in/out-of-combat behaviour being very opaque. I'll often see villagers bum rush a zombie to take him down, and other times I'll see dozens run away from a solo zombie in terror. 
• Stockpile Management
  • ​There is no way to manage stockpiles in a meaningful way. For example, if I want to make a stockpile near a construction project to speed things up, I have no way of telling my villagers to fill that stockpile up. The Stockpile Management suggestion will cover my ideas for solving this problem.
• Terraforming
  • ​There are very limited ways to interact with your environment Certain things can be removed, others can't. Water is just always in the way and offers no gameplay impact other than being a nuisance. It would be nice if we could fill in or create water/Tar etc.
• Tutorial/Learning Curve.
  • ​The lack of a tutorial, or graduated easing into the gameplay is a problem. While a tutorial isn't important at the moment, it will be as you reach final release so its worth keeping in mind.
  • The learning curve is also a bit wonky. I suggest creating a Simple "Tech Tree" similar to the harvesting tech unlocks but for buildings, There is already a rudimentary form of this implemented in the form of the first building blocking construction until its finished. Basic concept should be -> Buildings that need refined materials could be greyed out (but still clickable for city planning I suppose).
  • A similar "Tech Tree" could be implemented for spells, to prevent spells being thrown en-masse at the player. For example when the first monster spawn appears on the map the player gets a pop-up about combat spells and a little blurb explaining each one with a small packet of influence to experiment with.

The Ugly

 

Directionless Gameplay, Poor execution and absent minded ponderous pacing. Under-utilization of mechanical potential. Lack of Gameplay Punctuation.

• Poor Execution
  • My biggest criticism of the game is that the core gameplay loop: Build, Harvest, Defend, is supported by very weak mechanics in some areas and ends up feeling a bit anaemic. The idea of creating a creature maze that they have to navigate a la a tower defense game is brilliant in theory however the execution of this in-game is rather... boring. Its such a great mechanic potentially but it just falls flat somehow. It needs some iteration upon to get to a good place in my opinion. I'll elaborate on my ideas for this below.
• Directionless Gameplay,
  • ​Whats the point of surviving? Why do I care about surviving? Whats the end goal, whats the end game? A game without win-conditions is fine, but even games without definitive end-goals have interesting checkpoints on the way to end game that  punctuate the gameplay with power spikes. For example getting a particular tower that is utter ownage for a while in an Endless Tower defense game. It feels very aimless to just try and survive. While there are many people who enjoy the pure survival aspect of a game, I feel that ultimately the game will suffer if there is not some form of an end game "soft" or "hard" win condition[With the option to keep playing afterwards]. A lot of people like to play in bite-sized chunks of 30minutes to 1 hour. Having bite-sized goals that are achieveable in those sorts of timeframes will keep them engaged, even something as simple as unlocking a particular tower and placing it down let alone finishing the construction. I'll talk more about this in the suggestions section.
• Pacing
  • ​The pacing of the game is way off in my opinion. The first day starts off relatively peaceful with no challenges offered to the player. The next couple days are all right with a gentle curve upwards keeping the player on his toes. After that, the curve becomes vertical. It just seems so out of the blue that after day 4 my castle is under constant assault day in-day out with no breathers no matter the time of day. I feel that this ultimately damages the overall experience. A lack of punctuation between assaults due to attacks continuing during the day time gives the player no space to expand their initial holdings without great difficulty. It should be possible to expand a wall out a bit in the day time but I found that near impossible practically due to the constant assaults through my wall mazes and choke points. I have some suggestions for improving this I'll talk about below.
• Underutilization of Mechanical Potential
  • ​There is so much going on in this game, a dash of Dwarf Fortress, Tower Defense, RPG, Populous and more. These are all fantastic games and genres, and they have the potential to coalesce into an amazing experience. However, the tentative implementation of each "aspect" leaves the entire game feeling rather shallow.
  • It has bits of RPG tossed into the mix, but ultimately you went with an uninteractive form of character progression with citizens seemingly progressing at random. You could remove people levelling up and it wouldn't fundamentally alter the gameplay. That to me suggests it needs work.
  • The "God Game" aspect also is shallowly implemented, you can pick people up, drop them places, move resources, use spells and do all sorts of things that should be cool but end up feeling a bit pointless. Why not make the heal spell single target instance heal, so I can save a particular citizen or a group of them in a small aoe. An aoe healing font spell just feels weak. Just one example.
  • The "Tower Defense" aspect of the gameplay is similarly a bit weak. It has the foundations of a great mechanic, just like the rest, but ultimately the lack of tower diveristy and mechanics aside from "shoot to do damage to [Single-Target/Crowd]" makes it feel almost like an afterthought implementation. Wouldn't if be awesome if you could make moats, lay down tar on Black Sands, spike pits, have slow towers, etc etc.
  • The "Dwarf Fortress"/"Ceaser"/"Master of Olympus" aspect of the game is again[broken record at this point] a bit shallow. I honestly can't point to exactly what bothers me about it, but I think its the lack of things to do. Mostly spam food storage after getting basic infrastructure and defenses up, then switching over to higher tech.
  • Over-all, while this is my biggest area of criticism with the game, its also what I think has the potential to be the strongest area, if only you(we?) can figure out the bumps and dents to make the experience feel smoother and great. 

Suggestions

 

Pre-Suggestions Diclaimer: I'm not claiming every single thing I thought up here would be good for the game or even possible. These are just the things that came to mind when I was thinking of solutions for the problems I had with the game and the stuff I would like to see implemented.

• Spells
  • ​Implement a "Tech Tree for spells"
  • Remove redundant spells, make spells more immediate in their effects - the player already has ways to influence the game over time. Give him some punch(hard power) to go with his graft(soft power)
• Villager Ai
  • ​This is honestly an area I have near zero experience with development wise. Good luck!
  • Have People look for the resource unit closest to the project they are working on, not closest to themselves.
• Stockpile Management
  • ​Add a "Stockworker" job
    • Allow the player to designate resource flows from Production building to stockpile, stockpile to stockpile, stockpile to Production building. Stockworkers move resources around. 
  • Add a "Construction Pile" stockpile. A stockpile that takes 4 wood to make and holds 20 resources of construction materials[Mainly for use in conjunction with above to make supply lines to construction areas] but has very low health and decays health rapidly (say full decay over 2 days)
• Terraforming
  • ​Let us spread wood/food crops with people.
    • It should have a trade off, e.g you need to cut down 4 trees to spread 1.
  • Let us fill in/create water/tar/map specific terrain.
• Tutorial/Learning Curve
  • ​Implement a tutorial at sometime in the future.
  • Add more soft progression gating to the buildings to help new players cope with the options.
  • Also include the spells "tech tree".
• Execution, Direction, Pacing, Mechanics and Gameplay Punctuation.
  • ​Gameplay Punctuation, Pacing
    • ​Make it so that all undead creatures are severely weakened during the day and die off by about mid-day. Its all about intensity. Right now, Day and night don't feel different from a gameplay standpoint. Opinion warning.
      • The idea here is to create a defined space between each stage of the day. Past the first few days of gameplay this definition becomes increasingly blurred. The player should be able to tell what time of day it is by whats happening in the gameplay. 
      • Dusk should be the "Hunkering down" phase of the game, setting in for a long night with the first few sporadic undead harassing the walls.
      • Night should be the pants filling waves of undead, elementals etc crashing against the walls of your fortress. 
      • Dawn should be the crest of the wave, when the assault becomes it's most frenzied but begins to weaken and break with the advantage of the sun for the townspeople. 
      • Midday should be the reconstruction, consolidation and expansion phase of the game. Walls are rebuilt, towers rebuilt, and new more ambitious defenses are constructed. The main obstacles should be relatively harmless slimes occasionally wandering into villagers or near the town.
      • Evening is when the first undead should begin spawning for the night assault.
    • The outline above, I personally feel, would give the game a great sense of distinctive gameplay stages, the night phase being the Tower Defense stage, the Midday being the "Dwarf Fortress" stage and so on. This would give the game a much better gameplay flow in my opinion.
  • Direction
    • I'm sure you're well aware of the need for an "end-game" of some kind. A couple quick throwaway ideas:
      • A "Seat of Evil" which you must send human warriors out to fight and defeat in the ultimate battle for the land.
      • A Building you need to build to cleanse the land of evil.
      • Survive x days, with the final day having an ultimate assault on the town.
  • Mechanics, Execution
    • ​Pick a defining aspect of each genre your game shares a lineage with and make that the ultimate representation of those genres. For example the Tower defense aspect you could pick the Wave based nature of tower defense games[A la my suggestion above], and build other mechanics around it. For the god game aspect, you could go with any number of choices. But the main thing is that each mechanic needs to have its defining feature, in my opinon, to make it mechanically stand out and add to the experience. For the RPG aspect you could choose to go for a Macro level customisation, where as the collective levels of your villagers go up you can pick talents(+5% movement speed off road), or a micro level randomized customization where your people develop traits randomly as they level (E.G. "Light eater" -20% hunger drain). 

 

Thats my feedback for the game. I'm sure not everything I wrote will be helpful, and I'm sure you wont agree with everything but I am sure that I've definitely said some things about the game you haven't heard before.

 

Edit: In case its not clear, I love the game but I am very critical of things I love.

InDev 17c is out! This patch is mostly optimizing and minor bug fixes, but it also has a few gameplay tweaks I think you'll all love! Let me know what you think down in the comments.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board.

InDev 17c Stable Change Log
- Added setting to invert mouse map scrolling. It can be toggled in the settings menu.
- Villagers no longer get "stuck" in their house to try to heal while they're starving to death.
- Changed builder's priority from Repair -> Dismantle -> Build to Dismantle -> Build -> Repair
- Fire Elemental's level cap has been changed to 7.
- Slime's level cap has been changed to 3.
- Zombie's level cap has been changed to 5.
- Skeleton's level cap has been changed to 5.
- Firebolt Tower's maximum energy has been increased to 250.
- A small amount of essence is now released from crystals when they are harvested by workers.
- When essence has no where to go, it will now gently float around.
- Essence now lasts twice as long before it decays
- Slightly optimized particle update speeds
- Improved building and mob searching algorithms, increasing the overall AI speed.
- Fixed "Doomed World" pop up on world map.

The first stable build of 2016 has arrived! This update completely overhauls the entire game's graphics assets from scratch, quadrupling the base game resolution and doubling the animation frames for all mobs. This patch also has a plethora of under the hood changes, improving memory usage, fixing some minor bugs and making a few changes to the interface.

Also, due to the entire game being redrawn I am running another Screenshot Roundup. If you're interested, check out this announcement!

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board.

InDev 17 Stable Change Log
- The entire game's art assets have been completely redrawn from scratch at four times the resolution.
- All animations are now 8 frames, instead of 4.
- New music tracks, "Misty Awakening" and "Unbroken Circle".
- Added a new splash screen melody.
- Track "Main Theme in Piano" has been remastered from scratch.
- The "Unassign Work" button has been removed.
- You can hold the "Accent Mode" button (Left Control by default) to unassign work for whatever work assignment is currently selected.
- Fixed building health bars, they no longer report 0% health when health drops below 10%.
- Improved particle performance slightly.
- Rewrote the way the game loads and transitions between states, improving load times and peak memory usage.
- Cullis Gate's max energy has been reduced to 250, making it able to fire more often.
- Ghosts are now twice as likely to appear.
- Fixed the positioning of the "News and Announcements" bar on the main menu in some situations.
- Increased the "Stuck" movement speed when a mob is trying to walk off of a blocked tile.
- Fixed building and population dropdowns from miscalculating what the "last page" of the list was when clicking the "bottom" button.
- Fixed some objects (Mainly walls) from being misclicked when trying to pause or dismantle them.
- New skirmish mode games now correctly center on the villagers when the game starts.

Hi Guys,

 

I decided to try my luck with the map editor and created my very first map. I thought sharing it with you would be a nice way to celebrate, so here you are!

 

https://dl.dropboxus...756/Balaton.rar

 

 

 

Its main feature is a likeness of Lake Balaton, a true lake in Hungary, Europe, on the northern coast of which I live. I've tried to roughly portray some geographical features of the lake's surroundings as well: some volcanic hills along the northern shoreline and the like. The map features multiple starting zones with ample space and resources to start constructing your camp, as well as several ruined buildings for you to reclaim. These are situated in a way to represent real-world towns around the lake (Veszprem, Keszthely, Siofok). The map was kind of a little experiment for me, which I thoroughly enjoyed...hope you will find it interesting! 

 

Have fun playing!

 

Peter

The next content-centric patch for the InDev 15 series is here! This patch adds a bunch of food, a new map, some new terrains, and a mess of bug fixes and rebalancing.

.. oh, and mobs can swim now.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board.

InDev 15d Change Log
- Added map "Black Sands" to the Official Map list.
- Added a warning message if you try to load an old save game from a previous version of the game.
- Updated the minimap colors for the new terrains added in InDev 15c.
- Added depth mapping, now mobs can sink into certain terrain, like tar.
- Some terrain is now invulnerable, like water and lava for example. They can no longer be destroyed by any spells or mobs.
- Mobs can now swim across water if they feel it's the most suitable way to get to their destination.
- "Wandering" AI behavior now takes into account the movement cost to get to a tile, so they're less likely to walk into and around high cost tiles, like tar, crystals and swim in water for no reason.
- Villagers now go home to sleep when their energy is below 20, rather than 50.
- Both the chance to find a new partner, and the chance to mate with that partner have been greatly increased.
- Fire Bolt energy costs have been cut in half.
- "Motivate Land" spell now correctly displays a more accurate influence cost.
- The influence bar now highlights the amount of influence that will be consumed when you cast the currently selected spell or turns red if you lack the required influence.
- Fixed a crash if you use recall or banish on a mob and another mob is following it.
- Fixed a crash if a mob is following another mob, and suddenly the path becomes completely blocked. (Related to the above bug as well)
- New food! Cactus.
- Cactus, and all previous foods (Turnips and Potatoes) can now be planted and harvested properly, and will no longer magically become carrots instead.
- Water texture changed to be more visually suitable for swimming.
- The map editor's info panel now properly loses focus if you close the panel.

This guy REALLY wants to attack my village. Also his name is amusingly appropriate

 

That would be evily cruel to start in winter..even for Ray :-)

 

 

If anyone is ever bored, I also keep a semi-public record of every screenshot I've ever taken during the entire process of development from day 1 to now.

 

http://retropixelcas.../junk/devshots/

 

Enjoy the RPC history!

Click here for help on accessing the Unstable branch!

The first unstable build of the InDev 19 series is here! Hopefully, this unstable build will actually be pretty darn'ed stable. It's main focus is fixing bugs, doing some minor optimizing, and most importantly adding an entirely new road system to the game!

Let me know what you think of the new road system down in the comments.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board.

InDev 19 Unstable 1 Change Log

Roads
There are now 5 tiers of roads, you can now build roads starting from tier 1 all the way up to 5. For example, if you wanted a tier 2 road, you'd first have to create a tier 1 road and build a tier 2 road on top. The roads will be built and maintained by new workers from a new building.

• Tier 1: Basic path. Villagers will automatically generate a basic paths in the ground in high traffic areas, offering a minor speed boost. The paths can also be built manually, for no resource cost, and function as the foundation to build roads on.
• Tier 2: Wood path. Costs 1 log resource per tile.
• Tier 3: Cobble and wood path. Costs 1 rock resource per tile.
• Tier 4: Board and cobble road. Costs 1 board resource per tile.
• Tier 5: Board and cut stone road. Costs 1 stone resource per tile.
• Note that because you need to have the previous road built in order to build the next tier, bringing terrain from nothing to tier 5 actually costs 1 log, 1 plank, 1 rock and 1 stone per tile.
• All road types will decay over time, requiring basic maintenance. The more traffic a road gets, the faster it will decay.
• A new Way-Maker Shack has been added to build and maintain the roads. The workers will automatically repair the roads as they start to decay, and facilitate any new road construction you assign.
• You can assign road work (to either construct, upgrade or dismantle) on the left hand work tab under the harvesting assignment buttons.
• The map editor now has a full complement of buttons and tools for placing and erasing roads.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash that would sometimes cause the villagers and other mobs from being told there is a mob in range to interact with, when there actually wasn't. This effected multiple branches of the AI, like chatting, finding a mate, or finding a pack leader.
• Fixed a bug that would prevent a mob from finding something directly at it's feet, sometimes causing some search algorithms to run too frequently and slow down the game.
• Fixed a bug that would corrupt a mob's AI on load, causing the game to crash.
• Fixed a bug where deleting an already previously loaded profile and creating a new one in the same slot would clone the settings from the old profile.

AI Changes

• Most harvesting and clearing work is now assigned based on the closest location to the villager, rather than at random.
• Optimized the path finding and search algorithms, generally speeding up several areas of the game, mainly the AI.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Cleaned up a lot of the mob movement cost code and velocity calculations
• Adjusted mob tile positioning so their feet is center of a tile rather than their body.
• The debug menu (F3) is now a little prettier.
• The maps have been converted from a 8 layer system to a 7 layer system. The game will automatically convert old maps to the new system.
• Tons of small code cleanups.
• Minimap rendering process changed slightly to make topography more visible.
• Rewrote all of the tile set movement costs, giving costs to many tile sets on the map, like flowers, foods, stumps.
• Resources on the ground now increase movement costs on that tile.
• Added shadows to cactus, flowers, crystals and all foods.

Known Issues that will be resolved before the stable build

• If your village starts to starve and there's no food anyone on the entire map, the game can hang.