Cute art, quite motivating even without much content to speak of. Reminds me maybe a liiitle bit of Unholy Academy.
I think my main gripe so far is the UI. Everything's a bit sluggish and many things need 1 click too many. Inventory being the worst offenders. Also some stuff feels sorta hidden, or the game doesn't really give good feedback so you know what is happening and why (like for example when you lose items after a battle). But of course safe to assume there'll be changes along as stuff gets finalized ^^;
Good luck with the project. Seems ambitious, but could be nice.
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
The UI and ergonomy of the game is still very much lacking but it is indeed the last thing I'll be working on, since I have more features to implement beforehand.
It seems indeed very ambitious but I believe I can manage it, by staying very simple in the ideas I've exposed.
I might have a suggestion for you. But of course do whatever you want. It also might very well not be compatible with your current setup or might be to big of a change, but I feel like it could serve as inspiration. I am also not sure how well it would work performance wise.
I feel like the aspect of randomness can give replay value. I had a brief look at your game and all the NPCs governed by some discrete states e.g. where they are and what they are doing. A possible idea to make the characters distinct while retaining randomness might be the following.
Say a configuration of the system consists of the locations and lvls of all characters and what they are doing. On top of this each of your characters might have internal values describing their personality.
Than one might be able set up Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme to transition from one configuration to the next. I assume you have some "energy function" being the sum of how well each character is doing (the quality of your city could be included in this as well, as I saw in your devlog that you wanted the city to be variable as well). This energy function could also be higher or lower based on if characters "like" to be in this situation due their personality. So this would assign an energy value to each configuration. Then a transition rate from one configuration to the next could be described by the Boltzmann factor of your difference in energy between the states, as in the Metroplis-Hasting algorithm. (So a change from your current configuration to a randomly chosen different configuration would always be accepted if the energy decreases but if it increases it might still happen based on the Boltmann factor.)
So this transition would be accepted or rejected based on some random number which is higher or lower than its correspond transtion rate.
(More explantion at the Metroplis-Hasting algorithm wikipedia page)
Of course most states should be unreachable from any current one, so one could optimize here. And many decisions of NPCs are independent so these could be performed in parallel.
So this would minimize the energy function while admitting fluctuations due to randomness. I'd assume their would be a lot of metastability, so one could end up with "stationary" configurations which look quite different from one another based on the chosen seeds for the RNG.
Holy dang. You're way out of my league my dear friend xD. I don't get all that theory so I can't follow up.
I'm staying very simple in the design and in the way the NPCs behave.
What I have in mind is giving NPCs needs with a "Mental State" to manage. Their actions will be dictated by their needs first. If they don't have any needs, they will be moving around the city randomly and interacts with its surrounding.
Now, for a city to operate in accordance to its inhabitants, it will just checks the inhabitants needs.
Imagine 10 NPCs. 7 out of the 10 NPCs need a home. The City will very much likely build a home shelters.
You're making me think as well but the Job Locations will also need some kind of variable so the city knows, wether or not, the Job Location lacks something.
For example, a Bakery doesn't produce Pies for an amount of time because it is lacking the resources.
The city will likely build something to respond to that need.
I'm staying very simple with my designs for many reasons, mostly because I'm an uncultured swine dumbass.
I couldn't understand your explanations completly but I get some of the ideas. I really appreciate the time you've spent writing this.
Thanks!
