Hello all! It’s Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>
The weather got cold all the sudden.
Hope you all do not catch a cold.
On the last DevDiary, I’ve talked about the desires and social classes of the citizens,
about how citizens get to higher classes and spend their money to fulfill their desires.
And the needs of methods to make those with less earnings to earn more.
But as we all knows, ‘How’ always matters.
Status
The first idea was to put status for citizens.
In many other simulation games such as <Rim World> or <Oxygen not Included>,
many abilities for digging/building/fighting had been added,
and as the actions continues, experiences get stacked and abilities get better.
Players uses NPCs’ status to specialize them for certain works
This certainly is a system that is familiar to players enjoying this genre of the games,
As we make works to be done faster with higher stats of the NPCs,
they will naturally finish more jobs in same time and would get more profits.
But unlike the other games, there will be quite many citizens following the player’s orders,
so we had to narrow down stats into three major ones of strength, dexterity, and intelligence.
We’ve discussed a lot about which stats to get what benefits.
On the current state, we’ve made stronger rats can carry more items at once,
More dexterous rats to move and build faster,
And more intelligent to earn more experiences with the same amount of works.
Our expectation was to make STR needed in the early game, DEX in the mid, and INT in the end.
Changes in the designs of Stats page
After the system got settled, we’ve put diverse in the citizen’s stats such as stronger rats (3/0/0) and average rats (1/1/1).
To show this, animations were added on the accepting citizens page.
The intention was to make players think more for the use of the citizens.
Ratizens got talent!
However, after the test we have only found out that additional income was almost negligible.
In addition, strength gave too much benefits compared to other aspects,
so the players were only waiting for the stronger citizens.
Though we have intended the strength is the most valuable status in the early games, but this was far too much.
Equity for the weak ones!
To make them balanced we have halved the carrying capacity bonus of the strength but that was not enough.
More bonuses to DEX and INT were required.
So this time, we have added bonuses on the buildings affected by DEX and INT.
Bonuses differs from the buildings’ purposes
After this synergy-patch, we finally could improve the income of working ratizens with higher abilities.
In addition to that, we’ve put gaining-experience function for the bonus stats while working on the building, so that the Ratizens can produce and gain more as they work longer.
With the reason to get more diverse citizens,
Ratizens’ average income could get higher as the time goes,
and they could afford their expense even they get to the next classes.
Personalities
Diverse in basic status of the Ratizens gave some differences among those,
but they were not diverse enough to give individuality.
So this time, we have put personalities to add some details of the individuals to make the players can make some uses.
At first, we’ve simply ordered features with systemic values,
and made something like:
‘Strong: STR +3’, ‘Slow: Moving speed -30%’, and ‘Wasteful: Necessity losing speed +30%’
The characteristics like ‘Wasteful’ seemingly is a drawback, but this actually can be work as benefits in some aspects.
Those with the aspects might make the city run out of necessities,
however, by using up their wealth with faster speed, they can make money to circulate faster between the government and the citizens.
So experienced players will be able to make a special use of it.
Fatty going to eat while others working
Characteristics such as listed above has a feature that they will constantly affect on the rat with the same values.
This means at first there does is a need of consideration,
however when they are assigned on the jobs, and do not really need to considered any more.
Since it was not satisfied enough, I designed some characteristics that would affect citizens depending on the current states.
For example, “Aggressive: Gets happier when in battle”, or “Introverted: Gets happier as less people gets around”.
Through those, I wanted to make what would they enjoy more, and how would they get even happier in the situation.
Since the standard of happiness got more specific, this became a lot more important.
However, there also were some side effects of making the player to give up controlling them.
Who cares what they want?
Those physical and mental personalities were over 40s in kinds, total.
It became so hard to be memorized, and since the citizens were having complex combination of characteristics,
it was easier to give up than managing all the ratizens than managing all of each.
So in the current version, we are testing with the rats with only 2 personalities instead of 3,
and made descriptions much simpler to understand.
We think some of those should be polished more to be used exclusively.
If you have any ideas about new characteristics to help us, please let us know!
Since we have added stats and personalities to make citizens earn more money and happier life,
Now it was time to make methods to make the country richer.
So for the next DevDiary, I’ll share the game’s Taxing and policy systems.
Thank you so much for reading such long text again.
Hope you have a wonderful year’s end!
Homepage: https://www.CasselGames.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CasselGames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CasselGames
Hello all! It’s Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>
The weather got cold all the sudden.
Hope you all do not catch a cold.
On the last DevDiary, I’ve talked about the desires and social classes of the citizens,
about how citizens get to higher classes and spend their money to fulfill their desires.
And the needs of methods to make those with less earnings to earn more.
But as we all knows, ‘How’ always matters.
Status
The first idea was to put status for citizens.
In many other simulation games such as <Rim World> or <Oxygen not Included>,
many abilities for digging/building/fighting had been added,
and as the actions continues, experiences get stacked and abilities get better.
Players uses NPCs’ status to specialize them for certain works
This certainly is a system that is familiar to players enjoying this genre of the games,
As we make works to be done faster with higher stats of the NPCs,
they will naturally finish more jobs in same time and would get more profits.
But unlike the other games, there will be quite many citizens following the player’s orders,
so we had to narrow down stats into three major ones of strength, dexterity, and intelligence.
We’ve discussed a lot about which stats to get what benefits.
On the current state, we’ve made stronger rats can carry more items at once,
More dexterous rats to move and build faster,
And more intelligent to earn more experiences with the same amount of works.
Our expectation was to make STR needed in the early game, DEX in the mid, and INT in the end.
Changes in the designs of Stats page
After the system got settled, we’ve put diverse in the citizen’s stats such as stronger rats (3/0/0) and average rats (1/1/1).
To show this, animations were added on the accepting citizens page.
The intention was to make players think more for the use of the citizens.
Ratizens got talent!
However, after the test we have only found out that additional income was almost negligible.
In addition, strength gave too much benefits compared to other aspects,
so the players were only waiting for the stronger citizens.
Though we have intended the strength is the most valuable status in the early games, but this was far too much.
Equity for the weak ones!
To make them balanced we have halved the carrying capacity bonus of the strength but that was not enough.
More bonuses to DEX and INT were required.
So this time, we have added bonuses on the buildings affected by DEX and INT.
Bonuses differs from the buildings’ purposes
After this synergy-patch, we finally could improve the income of working ratizens with higher abilities.
In addition to that, we’ve put gaining-experience function for the bonus stats while working on the building, so that the Ratizens can produce and gain more as they work longer.
With the reason to get more diverse citizens,
Ratizens’ average income could get higher as the time goes,
and they could afford their expense even they get to the next classes.
Personalities
Diverse in basic status of the Ratizens gave some differences among those,
but they were not diverse enough to give individuality.
So this time, we have put personalities to add some details of the individuals to make the players can make some uses.
At first, we’ve simply ordered features with systemic values,
and made something like:
‘Strong: STR +3’, ‘Slow: Moving speed -30%’, and ‘Wasteful: Necessity losing speed +30%’
The characteristics like ‘Wasteful’ seemingly is a drawback, but this actually can be work as benefits in some aspects.
Those with the aspects might make the city run out of necessities,
however, by using up their wealth with faster speed, they can make money to circulate faster between the government and the citizens.
So experienced players will be able to make a special use of it.
Fatty going to eat while others working
Characteristics such as listed above has a feature that they will constantly affect on the rat with the same values.
This means at first there does is a need of consideration,
however when they are assigned on the jobs, and do not really need to considered any more.
Since it was not satisfied enough, I designed some characteristics that would affect citizens depending on the current states.
For example, “Aggressive: Gets happier when in battle”, or “Introverted: Gets happier as less people gets around”.
Through those, I wanted to make what would they enjoy more, and how would they get even happier in the situation.
Since the standard of happiness got more specific, this became a lot more important.
However, there also were some side effects of making the player to give up controlling them.
Who cares what they want?
Those physical and mental personalities were over 40s in kinds, total.
It became so hard to be memorized, and since the citizens were having complex combination of characteristics,
it was easier to give up than managing all the ratizens than managing all of each.
So in the current version, we are testing with the rats with only 2 personalities instead of 3,
and made descriptions much simpler to understand.
We think some of those should be polished more to be used exclusively.
If you have any ideas about new characteristics to help us, please let us know!
Since we have added stats and personalities to make citizens earn more money and happier life,
Now it was time to make methods to make the country richer.
So for the next DevDiary, I’ll share the game’s Taxing and policy systems.
Thank you so much for reading such long text again.
Hope you have a wonderful year’s end!
Homepage: https://www.CasselGames.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CasselGames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CasselGames