One week to 0.5 release! news

We’re now just a week away from releasing version 0.5! This version sees the addition of feudal cities & towns, nomadic fortresses and hunter-gatherer settlements to the world map; the creation of colonies by civilizations so inclined; an encyclopedia function that tells you everything about the world you’ve so far learned; a number of generated in-game histories which hint towards NPCs, items and plot points of interest; several tens of thousands of possible family sigils along with family trees for important houses; distinct flags for each type of civilization, and symbols for religions and cults; and various other small fixes, tweaks, memory/speed optimizations, etc etc. This week’s entry is going to be a summary of what’s happened in the last week, then next week – on the 12th – I’ll be releasing 0.5!

First off, for those who didn’t see this on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere, this week the game really surprised me for the first time in a while by producing this rather tremendous city upon a small island (with a single slum just on the outside) and only accessible by docks:

This in turn raised several things I’ll need to take account of for the next release, 0.6, when I’ll be generating the interiors of cities, towns, fortresses and settlements! Which is – what if a city has no roads? Or what if a town is completely enclosed by mountains? I’ll need to have the game recognize that and ensure the former can only be accessed by docks, for example, or ensure a mountain pass is generated to access the latter. It shouldn’t be too tricky to do that, but I’m glad this brought those possibilities to my attention.I’ve also updated the “choose a save” screen, so it now looks something like this. For this release it just lists every civilization, but in the future it will naturally only list those you have actually encountered:

And now some other more general notes:

- There will only be three cults visible in the in-game histories for this release and in the encyclopedia; these are the cults that will relate to the three early-game areas. Others are being coded in the game but will remain hidden for the time being. Likewise, only certain languages will show up in the “discoveries” list, but this will expand as versions go on.

- Although you can view nomadic fortresses and hunter-gatherer settlements in the encyclopedia, there is (as of yet) not a lot of information about these. I’m still working on precisely how they’re going to be structured, so there will be more on that in the near future.

- The resources map has been changed to the “resources and trade” map which displays roads as well as mineral resources, and will later show naval trade routes, mountain passes, etc (passes will show on the normal map too, but they’ll just be highlighted on this one).

- I’ve adapted the ziggurats to feature the correct language – though in this version you can still auto-translate the clues – and I’ve also begun some work under-the-hood for displaying other languages, allowing you to keep track of your information on languages, etc.

And that’s pretty much everything. See you next week for 0.5′s release! Until then you can keep up to date on my devblog, Facebook page, or Twitter feed. The devblog is updated weekly on Saturdays (or sometimes Sundays), Facebook a few times a week, and the Twitter roughly daily. Any thoughts, please leave them in the comments! Stay tuned...