August 23, 2012 | Dukus | 4 Comments
It's been a long time in updating. I been focusing on some contract work that takes most of my time so that I can continue to pay my bills. Ah, the life of indie game development. I've finally had some time to devote to the game this last week. I haven't added a whole lot of visual content lately but I've been playing the game and fixing a multitude of bugs. The one feature I have been working on is diseases in the population. The population may get sick naturally, or as the town grows when traders come to the town. The population can aquire influenza to the plague and everything in-between. Some diseases spread quickly, some linger, some have high fatality rates, some low. The diseases will spread from person to person based on health factors and proximity. Doctors and Herbalists can help keep the population healthy and cure the diseases in some cases. I've been finding that testing and balancing game features requires a certain population. Since the cities only grow as fast as people have children and they grow to adults, it can take a few hours to get to a high population. Especially given hard winters and/or famine and part of the population dies off. I need to play the game overly long just to get to a point where testing is feasible. To reduce this time I've added some debug options to the game such as placing buildings for free, spawning citizens, adding resources like food and firewood, and of course, spreading disease. And here area some new images of gameplay. [nggallery id=6]
Keep on trucking, hope to hear more from you soon. Also Just a question about the disease mechanic. I assume that if it's a particularly potent disease, if it goes un-managed at all you could kill off your entire populace, is this so?
It is possible that a disease will wipe out the entire population, although the most potent diseases do have a slight survival rate.
The game is looking awesome, if my computer will run it I'll have to give it a try when it's available.
It's great to get another update.
Wow! I am really looking forward to this. I can't wait to see this game in action.