It’s been a busy few evenings for me over the last few weeks and I’ve made what feels like a ton of changes to the game.
I fixed that bug I mentioned in the last dev update, and also squashed a few others that I noticed while testing.
There are a couple of quality of life changes I added, such as some CSS to highlight which section of the city you are currently viewing (if the context didn’t give it away - menubar titles might change):
That teal colour will be present after clicking on the menubar item. Makes a nice contrast to the ice-blue of the hover-over.
I’ve also added a handy tick count-down timer to the top-left of the screen, above the sidebar, so players are able to see the next server tick is due.
Some progress has been made on the world. I’ve decided on an undirected graph where each node is an area that players can claim as their own, found new colonies on, set up structures, fight other units etc. Each city will be attached to a node. I was thinking about making the edges of the graph have different weights representing the distance, but I don’t want to overcomplicate things any more than I already have, so for now each node is connected at the same distance, conceptually.
Another big feature that has been added is the concept of the city build queue. This is where a city can produce military units. There are checks on both client and server to make sure a city can afford the units, and if so, adds the units to the city build queue. Each unit counts down until it is complete, based on server ticks, and will appear in the Garrison when completed:
You can see from the screenshot above that functionally things are starting to form a cohesive piece. You can also see that a lot of work needs to go into the UX as the layout of the components is not great. For example, the garrison component is just listing out the units in no real order, you can’t see the units’ name or XP or veterancy level, and there is no grouping. That will all change as I work on this. My next thing to change is that awful spinner that looks totally out of place with the bootstrap styling.
Here’s what the city looks like after the unit production has completed:
That’s right, exactly the same, except with more little militia pictures.
Anyway, that’s all I have to show for now, some progress around adding new units. It doesn’t seem like much but it certainly took me long enough.
Update 21/01/24: I changed the garrison to show grouped units:
19th January 2024
