Hello Everyone, It’s Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
We joined Busan Indie connect festival, which was on September 1st to 4th, and had a great time.
I am really sorry to write this late, there has been a lot to work on after the show.
Memo note and stickers for visitors
Since BIC was bit far to join for most of the gamers, we have also prepared the online demo.
Which is, however, only in Korean, since still preparing for other languages.
If you are fine with it, you are welcome to join playing the game!
Any feedbacks related to the game are really be helpful to develop a better game.
Demo Link: https://bicfest.org/exhibition/view/
(This is a link to BIC homepage, which has many indie games. All waiting for the reviews, so welcome to play!)
(You can change the language of the website to English on top left corner)
(You have to sign-up for the website to enjoy all stuffs)
Now, let’s begin the actual DevDiary.
Biomes
Designing biomes was to put various types of tiles, plantations, and animals in the game.
Having different resources every rounds, players should change playing styles every time to survive and build town.
In the early development, seven biomes of were planned; field, tree, mine, marine, desert, jungle and volcanic.
All those biomes were designed to have different structures;
the tree made of wood and leaf tiles, having a vertically long shape, the desert with sands and sand stones with a horizontally long area.
To be honest, only few were planned in detail, since many will be changed for sure as we develop ideas.
With this vague blueprint, we are putting more detailed features a bit by bit.
Development of early map blueprint
To make every rounds feel new, tiles and biomes has to be located randomly with some order.
For example, mountains were to be located on surface area, mining area to be somewhere deep down underground,
and lava at the bottom of the map, so that they would seem more natural.
Thus I had to research how this to be done.
After some research, the combination of “Perline noise” method and Stamping method followed up in my mind.
But since on the early game, this would take too much time for testing,
and since many will be changed after, I decided to not to put way too much effort on this.
So I put this system on the side for a while, and decided to make a map with tile by tile manually for now.
As broad settings of biomes were set, animals and plants that could be fit to those had to be designed simultaneously.
Since even the biomes were merely concepts, we’ve just decided to draw sketches as many as possible and chose among those.
Many cute little creatures were sketched
New ideas of giving a various outlook to similar animals or plants followed up as we were setting the biomes,
so we kept sketching those and put together.
After this, we’ve sorted out some designs and colored the bests among those.
Concept designs of living organism
After coloring those creatures, I wondered which of those will fit with the map designed.
In order to check, we had to have an in-game map.
To have the map, we had to make a map editor.
Making map editor
Previously, when researching tile system, we have built tile creating function based on coordinates.
So the aim for this time was to make a function that the non-programmers could also create maps without any help or difficulties.
In this editor, putting a tile, areal tile modification, and save/load of created map functions were inserted.
Map editor: purely designed for functional reasons
It actually was quite fun to dotting a map.
We could create the World-Tree, a pyramid, caves, and ponds with the shape that we wanted those to be inserted.
Testing the game also got much easier, since now we could put whichever resources we needed to develop the city;
some could be made more scarce, some to be more flourished.
However, the huge objects created were unable to be viewed as we wished to, on actual playing.
Unlike <Terraria>, our tiles sizes were too large and viewpoint was much close and limited.
In addition, since the creatures designed were not fixed to be used,
putting object input function in the map editor could become a total waste.
Thus to crosscheck the designs, we simply used Photoshop to combine the image of the map and creatures designed.
Conceptual jungle, marine, volcanic biomes mixed together with organisms
They actually formed in much better harmony than expectations.
Using some point colors and silhouettes were having a great effect.
When the background images and camera filter with effect sounds are added,
I am sure each of these will become a great parts of vast nature.
Other than those visual differences,
the systematical identity for the users to feel differences were also to be designed.
For example, marine biome to be created under water, so diving devices are required to research,
and volcanic biome to have heat effect, so citizens without equipment would get damages.
Thanks to the map editor, testing and modifying a map got much easier and this really accelerated game development.
I believe this could even be useful to the users too, if we add some more functions like placing specific objects to specific locations.
When these are done, I believe that many users could create challenging maps and share those with the others.
Though we are unsure how will the randomized map creating system based biomes would have natural looking or not,
I think map editor granted us another option to make maps,
since our goal is to give various maps to the users for various methods to build a utopia.
DevDiary for September ends here!
For the next DevDiary, I’ll write about resources in the biomes,
and how those resources will be binding each other to make a manufacturing chain.
Hello Everyone, It’s Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
We joined Busan Indie connect festival, which was on September 1st to 4th, and had a great time.
I am really sorry to write this late, there has been a lot to work on after the show.
Memo note and stickers for visitors
Since BIC was bit far to join for most of the gamers, we have also prepared the online demo.
Which is, however, only in Korean, since still preparing for other languages.
If you are fine with it, you are welcome to join playing the game!
Any feedbacks related to the game are really be helpful to develop a better game.
Demo Link: https://bicfest.org/exhibition/view/
(This is a link to BIC homepage, which has many indie games. All waiting for the reviews, so welcome to play!)
(You can change the language of the website to English on top left corner)
(You have to sign-up for the website to enjoy all stuffs)
Now, let’s begin the actual DevDiary.
Biomes
Designing biomes was to put various types of tiles, plantations, and animals in the game.
Having different resources every rounds, players should change playing styles every time to survive and build town.
In the early development, seven biomes of were planned; field, tree, mine, marine, desert, jungle and volcanic.
All those biomes were designed to have different structures;
the tree made of wood and leaf tiles, having a vertically long shape, the desert with sands and sand stones with a horizontally long area.
To be honest, only few were planned in detail, since many will be changed for sure as we develop ideas.
With this vague blueprint, we are putting more detailed features a bit by bit.
Development of early map blueprint
To make every rounds feel new, tiles and biomes has to be located randomly with some order.
For example, mountains were to be located on surface area, mining area to be somewhere deep down underground,
and lava at the bottom of the map, so that they would seem more natural.
Thus I had to research how this to be done.
After some research, the combination of “Perline noise” method and Stamping method followed up in my mind.
But since on the early game, this would take too much time for testing,
and since many will be changed after, I decided to not to put way too much effort on this.
So I put this system on the side for a while, and decided to make a map with tile by tile manually for now.
As broad settings of biomes were set, animals and plants that could be fit to those had to be designed simultaneously.
Since even the biomes were merely concepts, we’ve just decided to draw sketches as many as possible and chose among those.
Many cute little creatures were sketched
New ideas of giving a various outlook to similar animals or plants followed up as we were setting the biomes,
so we kept sketching those and put together.
After this, we’ve sorted out some designs and colored the bests among those.
Concept designs of living organism
After coloring those creatures, I wondered which of those will fit with the map designed.
In order to check, we had to have an in-game map.
To have the map, we had to make a map editor.
Making map editor
Previously, when researching tile system, we have built tile creating function based on coordinates.
So the aim for this time was to make a function that the non-programmers could also create maps without any help or difficulties.
In this editor, putting a tile, areal tile modification, and save/load of created map functions were inserted.
Map editor: purely designed for functional reasons
It actually was quite fun to dotting a map.
We could create the World-Tree, a pyramid, caves, and ponds with the shape that we wanted those to be inserted.
Testing the game also got much easier, since now we could put whichever resources we needed to develop the city;
some could be made more scarce, some to be more flourished.
However, the huge objects created were unable to be viewed as we wished to, on actual playing.
Unlike <Terraria>, our tiles sizes were too large and viewpoint was much close and limited.
In addition, since the creatures designed were not fixed to be used,
putting object input function in the map editor could become a total waste.
Thus to crosscheck the designs, we simply used Photoshop to combine the image of the map and creatures designed.
Conceptual jungle, marine, volcanic biomes mixed together with organisms
They actually formed in much better harmony than expectations.
Using some point colors and silhouettes were having a great effect.
When the background images and camera filter with effect sounds are added,
I am sure each of these will become a great parts of vast nature.
Other than those visual differences,
the systematical identity for the users to feel differences were also to be designed.
For example, marine biome to be created under water, so diving devices are required to research,
and volcanic biome to have heat effect, so citizens without equipment would get damages.
Thanks to the map editor, testing and modifying a map got much easier and this really accelerated game development.
I believe this could even be useful to the users too, if we add some more functions like placing specific objects to specific locations.
When these are done, I believe that many users could create challenging maps and share those with the others.
Though we are unsure how will the randomized map creating system based biomes would have natural looking or not,
I think map editor granted us another option to make maps,
since our goal is to give various maps to the users for various methods to build a utopia.
DevDiary for September ends here!
For the next DevDiary, I’ll write about resources in the biomes,
and how those resources will be binding each other to make a manufacturing chain.