Civilizations, noble houses, and an early 0.5 release? news

This release is moving a lot faster than expected. Although the first two months of this year only allowed me to spend a small amount of time coding, I’ve probably got through around 80-85% of the content for this release. You can see our current progress on thedevelopment plan page and I’m very nearly at the point of bug-fixing and optimization. The final remaining large chunk of content I need to add is the generation of relevant components of world histories should as the construction of cities, major battles and wars, discoveries, uprisings/civil wars, plagues and natural disasters, and the like. In this release some small glimpses of the plot will be visible through-out these histories and these will inform the conditions that certain civilizations and NPCs start the game in. Last week I posted about city districts, so for starters I wrote up the Guidebook entry for city districts – as ever, my focus is to give the player mechanic information, but very little “What am I meant to do?” information.

However, for the most part this week I’ve been working on filling out the remaining parts of the worldbuilding required. I firstly wanted to finish off what remained of civilizations, and have all the relevant information display in the in-game guidebook. The guidebook civilization entries currently show a number of things. They show the flag of that civilization, the religion that civ follows (if any) and a 7×7 image of their capital city (along with its name). Down the left side it quickly summarizes the policies that civilization follows, then tells you information on the right about their leadership. It starts with the term they use to describe their leader, which depends on policy and civ-type: a monarchic feudal civ might be led by a “Czar” or an “Emperor”, while a chiefdom-focused hunter-gatherer civ might be led by an “Ice-King”, or a nomadic civ by a “Great Sultan”. Most civs will use different terms for those who rule. It then lists the important houses in that civ, followed by other information which differs according to civ. If feudal, it shows the towns in that civilization (and later mines and other structures); for nomadic civs it lists their fortresses, whilst I haven’t fully decided yet on what information will show for hunter-gatherers. It lastly states whether the civ allows slavery and/or gladiatorial combat, and if slavery is allowed, how slaves can be easily identified (e.g. missing little fingers, facial tattoos, brands, collars, etc). In the image below you can also see on the left of this image some of the potential names for civilizations, such as “Nation of X”, or “Descendants of X”, or “Brood of X”, of “Wanderers of X”, and so forth. These reflect different types of civilization and also, in some cases, their policy choices about leadership, producing a wide range of different naming conventions for civilizations. A player should come to recognize what each denotes in time, but I think they – like the myriad other name generators in URR! – do a lot towards my goal of building a world of complexity, ambiguity, and non-uniformity.

I have also finished up most of the information on noble houses in the encyclopedia. Each entry (all guidebook entries will only appear when you discover the civ/ family/ religion/ whatever in question) shows their name, what civ they belong to, their coat of arms and their motto on the left, and then the flag of their parent civilization and the family tree on the right. Getting the family trees to work well was surprisingly tricky, but I’m very happy with how they’ve worked out. The oldest members are the top, the youngest at the bottom. The oldest member of the family that wasn’t someone who married into the family will be the unofficial “head” of the family. The key to understanding the diagram is as follows: double-lines show someone from the house itself; dotted lines someone who married into the family; white shows someone alive, grey someone deceased; gold denotes the ruler of the civilization the house belongs to (so in this case, Tol Malake is the ruler of Utokaqu); whilst a blue colour will denote the player in whatever house the player belongs to (not shown here). Also, I’ve somewhat altered the rules of succession from the real-world of the (roughly) 17th century. Family names are not carried according to the men in the family, but rather by the status of the family. In the case below, some of the people who married into the family (the dotted lines) may be of either sex, but the noble family name was the one that “won out” and was used for any children.

As above, the remaining major chunks of content are finishing off religion generation and then beginning to work on significant historical events. After that I need to make a few changes to the world-gen screen to incorporate the new history/civ gen, update the start/load screen with information about the player’s civilization, house, religion etc, improve map data storage (I should be able to hack down map load times again with this new change) and then it’s bug-fixing and optimization. Next week we’ll probably be talking about languages or religions (the latter of which I know last week I suggested would be this week, but coding has gone in a different direction in the past seven days).

Until next time 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...