I'm working towards the release of my new game Imhotep, Pyramid Builder on Steam. As I did for my previous game, I will report on the progress each and every week. Even if there is no progress, the report will be made. This is the best way to keep on track, and fight procrastination.
This week has been spent on getting actual game play in. I hooked up the spending of silver on buildings. Here's the hieroglyph that spells silver.
I added scrolling by moving the mouse to the edge of the window. I fixed the OSX build of the game. It looks really nice and sharp on a retina screen. I added emoticons. If a builder is tired and hungry, a sleepy face is used to denote that state.
I created a hiring menu. Once hired, the new workers are spawned sequentially from the tax office. I improved the gradient visualization.
The buildings all compete with each other for deliveries of goods. They also compete with each other in providing goods for pickup. This competition needs to be regulated, as we do not want to swamp or starve one building over the others. To do this, I am using the notion of 'urgency'. I've spent a lot of time this week tuning these urgency levels, so that if a building goes too long without service, it will increase the desirability to the workers.
All these efforts mean that the game has slowly gotten to a playable state. Placing buildings, hiring workers, earning silver are all in, so there already is a game challenge in there. It just needs a lot of finishing up. Win/lose conditions, leader boards, achievements, load and save games, game settings and Steam integration are all still on the todo list. Hopefully I can take some of these on next week.