Hello everyone, it's Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
After long Jang-ma has gone, scorching heat came and outside is so steaming hot.
Thanks for being able to work indoor only, we are developing the game continuously.
For this time on DevDiary, the player character's and civilians' action tree will be explained.
Player Character
In <Ratopia>, the protagonist is a playable character.
You will become a princess/prince of a kingdom, who had to run away from her/his kingdom due to the rebellion.
The reason of this rebel was unknown, may be because some were not satisfied with your ancestor's rule,
or may be some were just way too much greedy.
Thus, trusting no one, the princess/princess tries to build and rule the own kingdom in the land of far far away.
Refuges running away from the warring kingdom
Normally in the city-building simulation games, there is no player character.
However, in <Ratopia>, the player has to control the main character to order, build, gather, and battle.
This restriction will possibly be uncomfortable, however, due to the limit of sight, you will administrate your city with different view,
and also will be able to develop the city that is carried with a single strong hero - you.
Whenever there's a problem with citizens, you will be able to interfere the situation directly.
Player character will be able to do most of works that could be done by civilians.
In the early game, you have to do simple works by yourself.
However, as the city grows, there will be citizens to be ordered.
They will build, gather, mine, hunt, and do whatever simple stuffs you order.
Changes in revolving order panel
As the citizens work for the player, they get paid from the exchequer, which will be the player's money.
In order to maintain the wealth of the city, you will need to tax them,
or to explore the world to find money-makable resources such as copper and gold.
Adventure the underworld for treasures
We are planning to put a system to form royal guards to raid huge monster,
or to defend the city from raiders seeking for wealth to steal.
The player will be able to buff the allies or teleport to designated spots,
so that both of maintaining the city and leveling up the player character could be meaningful and useful.
Citizen's action Tree
After the citizen's route-finding system got created, citizen's daily lives were to be put.
So that, when there is nothing ordered, they could eat, sleep, or talk as they wish to.
For this, we've put hunger, exhaustion, sanitation, and interest gauges
to make them act as what they wanted to, as each of the gauges declines.
One by one from hunger and exhaustion to sanitation
As more of the citizen's possibilities increased, we had to set priorities of actions that they could follow.
So we've distinguished their actions into pieces, structurized and order them into 6 groups.
1. Exceptional: In condition of coma or severe would so that they cannot follow any order given.
2. In Battle: In the middle of emergency such as in battle, fire, or disaster.
3. Sleep: Exhausted so much, and could not do any other action rather than sleeping.
4. Rest: Eat, shop, or use service buildings to fulfill their needs.
5. Work: Work at their working places, build, gather, mine, or transport things to earn money.
6. Idle: Waiting for an order to follow since there's nothing to do.
Action priority order map in early development.
After organizing. some of these actions had to be distinguished into more detailed parts.
For example, building action into "Building Foundation (removing obstacles)", "Transporting Resources", and "Building the Structure".
As the actions were given after they are done with what have ordered before,
minutely divided actions could make them more natural and smoothly moving.
However, even after structurization and the citizens are acting with order,
the game did not work as we have expected.
They were rushing for the food, which has already been taken by the others,
or all were transporting same materials to same blueprint.
Even the player's action of transporting or building, even digging a ground could make the citizens fools.
Freezing bug caused by a job relocation on item-transporting-citizen
Some changes had to be made;
the order already on going by a citizen must not to be interrupted by the other citizens,
further works had to get less priority,
and citizens' actions had to be canceled when the player interrupts them in the middle.
As such un-expectancies were fixed, they were behaving mush as planned.
Now we could put timeline to make them act restricted to the time;
work in day and sleep when the night come.
At first, we've created timeline with three parts;
working hours, resting hours, and sleeping hours.
But then the citizens were rushing to have meal as soon as the resting hours comes,
and since those working in the service facilities were rushing for the meal too,
none could get the service they needed.
Citizens rushing directly to the farm where the foods are
So we have combined working hours with resting hours so that the citizens could go to eat and enjoy stuffs.
But recently, sleeping hours seemingly needed to be combined too,
since some citizens could not get enough sleep with restricted time, as the city grows.
So now there's only a free time; they can go for work, sleep, eat, or enjoy!
With limited system of the game on current state,
I am glad that this 'all-free time table' makes citizens to move with more efficiency.
Still, there will be an option to customize citizen's timeline for sure, later.
With those tests and fixations gone through, the game now works like a simulation game.
But in unexpected situations and the battles citizens are still acting weird,
there's still a long way to go.
The 5th DevDiary ends here!
Thank you so much for reading this long article.
The next DevDiary will be about environmental creations and tile editors in the game
Take care, and watch out for the heat!
Hello everyone, it's Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
After long Jang-ma has gone, scorching heat came and outside is so steaming hot.
Thanks for being able to work indoor only, we are developing the game continuously.
For this time on DevDiary, the player character's and civilians' action tree will be explained.
Player Character
In <Ratopia>, the protagonist is a playable character.
You will become a princess/prince of a kingdom, who had to run away from her/his kingdom due to the rebellion.
The reason of this rebel was unknown, may be because some were not satisfied with your ancestor's rule,
or may be some were just way too much greedy.
Thus, trusting no one, the princess/princess tries to build and rule the own kingdom in the land of far far away.
Refuges running away from the warring kingdom
Normally in the city-building simulation games, there is no player character.
However, in <Ratopia>, the player has to control the main character to order, build, gather, and battle.
This restriction will possibly be uncomfortable, however, due to the limit of sight, you will administrate your city with different view,
and also will be able to develop the city that is carried with a single strong hero - you.
Whenever there's a problem with citizens, you will be able to interfere the situation directly.
Player character will be able to do most of works that could be done by civilians.
In the early game, you have to do simple works by yourself.
However, as the city grows, there will be citizens to be ordered.
They will build, gather, mine, hunt, and do whatever simple stuffs you order.
Changes in revolving order panel
As the citizens work for the player, they get paid from the exchequer, which will be the player's money.
In order to maintain the wealth of the city, you will need to tax them,
or to explore the world to find money-makable resources such as copper and gold.
Adventure the underworld for treasures
We are planning to put a system to form royal guards to raid huge monster,
or to defend the city from raiders seeking for wealth to steal.
The player will be able to buff the allies or teleport to designated spots,
so that both of maintaining the city and leveling up the player character could be meaningful and useful.
Citizen's action Tree
After the citizen's route-finding system got created, citizen's daily lives were to be put.
So that, when there is nothing ordered, they could eat, sleep, or talk as they wish to.
For this, we've put hunger, exhaustion, sanitation, and interest gauges
to make them act as what they wanted to, as each of the gauges declines.
One by one from hunger and exhaustion to sanitation
As more of the citizen's possibilities increased, we had to set priorities of actions that they could follow.
So we've distinguished their actions into pieces, structurized and order them into 6 groups.
1. Exceptional: In condition of coma or severe would so that they cannot follow any order given.
2. In Battle: In the middle of emergency such as in battle, fire, or disaster.
3. Sleep: Exhausted so much, and could not do any other action rather than sleeping.
4. Rest: Eat, shop, or use service buildings to fulfill their needs.
5. Work: Work at their working places, build, gather, mine, or transport things to earn money.
6. Idle: Waiting for an order to follow since there's nothing to do.
Action priority order map in early development.
After organizing. some of these actions had to be distinguished into more detailed parts.
For example, building action into "Building Foundation (removing obstacles)", "Transporting Resources", and "Building the Structure".
As the actions were given after they are done with what have ordered before,
minutely divided actions could make them more natural and smoothly moving.
However, even after structurization and the citizens are acting with order,
the game did not work as we have expected.
They were rushing for the food, which has already been taken by the others,
or all were transporting same materials to same blueprint.
Even the player's action of transporting or building, even digging a ground could make the citizens fools.
Freezing bug caused by a job relocation on item-transporting-citizen
Some changes had to be made;
the order already on going by a citizen must not to be interrupted by the other citizens,
further works had to get less priority,
and citizens' actions had to be canceled when the player interrupts them in the middle.
As such un-expectancies were fixed, they were behaving mush as planned.
Now we could put timeline to make them act restricted to the time;
work in day and sleep when the night come.
At first, we've created timeline with three parts;
working hours, resting hours, and sleeping hours.
But then the citizens were rushing to have meal as soon as the resting hours comes,
and since those working in the service facilities were rushing for the meal too,
none could get the service they needed.
Citizens rushing directly to the farm where the foods are
So we have combined working hours with resting hours so that the citizens could go to eat and enjoy stuffs.
But recently, sleeping hours seemingly needed to be combined too,
since some citizens could not get enough sleep with restricted time, as the city grows.
So now there's only a free time; they can go for work, sleep, eat, or enjoy!
With limited system of the game on current state,
I am glad that this 'all-free time table' makes citizens to move with more efficiency.
Still, there will be an option to customize citizen's timeline for sure, later.
With those tests and fixations gone through, the game now works like a simulation game.
But in unexpected situations and the battles citizens are still acting weird,
there's still a long way to go.
The 5th DevDiary ends here!
Thank you so much for reading this long article.
The next DevDiary will be about environmental creations and tile editors in the game
Take care, and watch out for the heat!