Resourciv: Revamping Peeps
I've been struggling with how I kinda really hate game design. No matter if I play things or run things or design things, the number one thing I hate is cruft masquerading as complexity. I like messing with dynamics and seeing what happens when multiple intersect, but I don't like having lots of levers and dials that you need to optimize in order to play well, especially when it all turns out to be a "solved game" of knowing what to do every time. This makes me more of a cutter than a creator, sometimes, like how my personal D&D rules boil down (my idea of) the game into extremely discrete, structural dynamics.
This has proven a blessing and a curse for Resourciv, my civ-like computer game, in that I'm terrified of adding anything for fear of making it needlessly complex—but then I don't add anything at all. I've been constantly saying over the last few months that I am running up against game design, and now I'm standing in front of a wall. Let's tear it down.
Current Approach
As-is right now, there's two (confusing) numbers representing a settlement's population: "population" proper represents the literal number of people who live in a city; and "peeps" translate population into more reasonable units (divide by one thousand, take cubic root) for allocating labor and consuming resources. Under the hood, your settlement knows exactly how many people belong to which cultural demographic, and that percentage translates to bonuses for cultural influence and caste-based production for peeps. It's a little confusing. No, it's very confusing.
Population can also be thought of as the growth number in Sid Meier's Civilization, except (again) that it represents real people. Your population increases by a certain percent each turn based on the available habitat (base) and how much surplus food you have (multiplier). This is not just an increase of an integer, but the change in population is distributed to different demographic "buckets". Each settlement's proximity to other settlements of the same culture, or settlements of allied cultures, increases both the growth rate (representing immigration) and allows for potentially new demographics to join the settlement.
That was kind of a cool system to have implemented, even if it was entirely under the hood. The problem is that it isn't very extendible. Something I need to represent, that I've been avoiding implementing, is the relocation of populations between population centers. Like I said, I sort of implemented "immigration", but it's not enough: I want to represent the real movement of people. The problem is that you can't just move peep-values between settlements because 1 peep in a 3-peep city represents 9k people whereas 1 peep in a 10-peep city represents 100k people. This would mean that I'd have to work with the raw population number, which is both tedious because the numbers are big and also annoying because you're usually just thinking about the peeps you actually work with.
So, if it's time to kill one darling, I'm leaning towards population. I need to go all-in on peeps.
Proposed Approach
Population centers have peeps, representing an abstract (non-specific) number of people. Each peep has a cultural identity, and you assign peeps to buildings in order to generate or transform resources. Training a tribe or colonist subtracts 1 peep from their mother city, which can either create a new city or join an existing one.
Each population center has a growth bar which progresses when a population has enough surplus habitat and food (modified by happiness); at 100%, a new peep is born with a cultural identity matching one of the existing peeps in that settlement. Disease or starvation may cause the growth bar to regress, resulting in the death of a peep.
Happiness is determined first of all by the ratio of a peep's leisure time to their labor time, the latter determining the rate at which one generates or transforms resources as well as the rate at which the city produces new buildings or meeples. (This one will be the most difficult, if I go this route, because I'd need to scale resources and introduce logic for buildings to under-perform if they don't have enough supply, not to mention that the resource system calculates everything in one go which makes it difficult to dynamically disable or modify components. This is the singular fidgety thing I've wanted to implement for forever that I may never actually get the chance to do because of the implications.)
Unhappy peeps, if their movement is not restricted, may relocate to another city—which I first envisioned as having to do with habitat, but could also do with job prospects (if buildings can be constructed without having enough free workers) or general happiness. This could be represented by autonomous meeps who may be captured by hostile meeps.
Workforce and happiness will be removed as resources and integrated as part of the new system, which will hopefully also allow for some historical contingency in terms of how peeps meet their needs (or what they even need in general).
I've tried Resoureciv the other day and got somewhat confused. I was unable to make a settler/tribe and thus decided to test my mettle against my neighbours. I figured I could take their city. It was a desaster: I lost my entire army to enemy troops and harassment by archers.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile I am unsure how my agressive society was actually faring at home. I mean, I built a mine and I used scouts to explore many a land, hunted some pigs (does that do anything besides be combat?). Perhaps some sort of overview screen with the most important bits about your civilisation would be helpful. If it already exists, I didn't find it.
I really like your visuals (did you do them yourself?), although being a millenial, I prefer the squares of yore to the hex grid. I also like that things get more expensive if you have more of them. When it comes to traditional four-x-games, I usually only enjoy the explore and expand phase, not the exploit and exterminate and usually quit once the whole world/galaxy is explored. The end game with huuuge armies/fleets always annoyed me and putting a cap on that is a good thing.
The interesting thing about non-violent solutions to conflicts in video games is whether or not you can successfully make them as fun as warfare/violence. That is a difficult task.
It's interesting to see a left-leaning spin on the whole civ-genre. Like I said before: I think that a realistic approach to civ-management should be that culture and such things mostly just happen and you as the government have to react to that, rather than steer what major breakthrough comes next. I mean, has a tribal leader in the stone age tasked their people with inventing the wheel, which prompted them to work on that for the next few centuries? No. Is your neighbours suddenly being able to ride horses a shift in the political landscape that you must absolutely react to or probably perish? Yes, but also, you now know that it's possible to ride horses. Like, without putting in the work yourself.
I'll definetly be keeping an eye on your project.
thanks for trying it! here's an elaboration on different points:
Delete- i only added tribes very recently; in the first published version, you need statecraft in order to produce colonists. in the latest published version, you can produce tribes or colonists if you have enough commerce (based on the # peeps in your most populous settlement).
- glad to hear that warfare is difficult for others! i'm not very good at civ despite making a sort of "version" of it, so i wasn't sure if i had actually made a good AI despite often also losing.
- hunting animals gives your closest city 100-600 growth (population), which accelerates growth during the earliest stages when it's just (albeit intentionally) pretty slow. there's a resources panel on the top-left, but otherwise there's not much else going on. still an early version where i'm putting together the basics.
- that's more-or-less my intent with the discovery system, although you get a choice of three random picks. this is helped by allies giving you access to make discoveries that they have already made (even if you don't meet the conditions), and you can also learn enemies' discoveries by taking their settlements.
thank you for your interest and kind words! the art is mine :) i like pixel art
What would you think of abandoning the Civ-game sacred cow that settlers take a peep from the city that builds them? Could you then stick to population instead of peeps? (I think population's more interesting)
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention it, it's weird that it takes 100k people to go found a new city in the 10-peep circumstance you describe. If anything I might expect it to take fewer people when there's an established urban center to rely on for support.
Idea: How about you don't build a settler/meep but a marker that lets you designate a new settlement area. Thereafter, a portion of the mother city's growth goes there and some point in the future, a new town just pops up. The higher the growing pressure, the faster this will work. It may even help you with happyness: An unhappy portion of the population can go somewhere else for a fresh start or something like that.
Deletethat was actually the approach i had before! (except that peeps were still used to simplify resources and labor and so on.) a few days ago, i even removed the initial population of 1k that cities started with, so that they did essentially act as containers for the surplus growth of other cities.
Deletethe problem is that although population is superficially less abstract, in representing more "real" quantities of people, the restriction of population to settlements greatly limits the interactions possible. when i talk about "real movement", even though peeps are more abstract quantitatively, their discreteness means they can be physically moved across the map in an intuitive way. this opens the door to represent the physical processes of human relocation and trafficking (which is how i plan to subvert civ).
"RESOURCIV is a civ-like game with a particular emphasis on population management, resource production, and social history."
DeleteDo you think there's any risk that simplifying your population units, and trimming off "under the hood" demographics, will structurally refocus the game away from "population management" and "social history," towards more conventional civ-like exploration and expansion?
i'm very confident that there will be no risk, or at least none that has already existed!
Deleteeverything related to population has already been mediated through peeps as discrete measurements, when it comes to the management of resources and even populations themselves (basically, i already convert percentages of population to an approximate number of peeps). the difference is between being more realistic content-wise or more so dynamically, and the latter is more interesting to me since realistic content means nothing if it can't intuitively model structural dynamics.
to reiterate: even though the population numbers were superficially more "realistic", they were actually more abstract with respect to the game's dynamics because they were shielded from being virtually "physical". with discrete peeps, i can better model the experiences of populations, not just in terms of movement (by which i partly mean, to be less euphemistic, abduction and trafficking) but in specific relationality to their settlement and each other.
this is overall an effort to move the game further away from civ, and to put real emphasis on populations and resources by being more selective about which abstractions are more or less expressive.