Hi - I'd like to share my hobby project

[Deckhead]

I would love to play it but I only have Windows. Mind you, I have a Surface Pro, so it turns into a tablet.

What elements are mac specific? How closely are they tangled in the rest of the game?

Can you explain more about how to capital > labour works? How did you go about designing the system? I try to come up with my own ideas, but how, do you basically make the game in a spreadsheet first?

[100goats]

Hi. Your game sounds interesting.

I don't have much time, but I can help you port your game to Windows and Linux if you decide to use SDL and C++.
I can mostly just answer questions and test for you.
Just send me a private message on this forum.

I have also heard very good things about raylib and it is well-documented and cross-platform.

https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/wiki

https://www.raylib.com/examples.html

Edit:
My advice for cross-platform development is too start early in order to develop a process for porting. The earlier the better.
Then, make small incremental updates across each platform rather than wait to port large changes.

[Deckhead]

Your resources system sounds interesting. Have I got this right:

• Size of your city determines number of workers
• You assign an amount of capital to tiles which builds the tile up into productive tiles
• You can also assign capital to other areas like military and research, which limits your growth capability
• Your workers work tiles to produce more capital

Workers work tiles that produce more capital than what I've placed into that tile?

Is the capital pooled at a city-level or a civ-level (are armies paid for by the city or the civ)?

[Deckhead]

Have you got any screenshots or videos to show?

Reading about your game makes me want to develop my own 4X harder. At the moment it's just in thinking stages...

[Deckhead]

How are you handling the AI? When looking into it for my own game, I haven't implemented AI, but I'm thinking of using GOAP, with the parameters stored in external files so I can hot-load changes and see what happens.

I remember reading or watching a dev video on the Sims, and they used a logging system to debug the. Basically, it logged all the reasons for making decisions etc which allowed them to easily work out why an AI was preferring to eat food rather than examine the new furniture.

[Deckhead]

Yeah, it would be nice to have full time devs to work on tools like that (to be able to see why the AI does things).

Hotloading and all sounds nice, but in my experience this is what I've learned:

Tools, in my experience, are extremely helpful. If you use some sort of UI library, they are rarely complicated to program, all they require is log files from the games execution. So long as your game logs things in a standard data format, your tool can load and parse it so you can make sense of it.

I've found that when there are interacting structures or systems within the game, having a tool to visualise it has been incredibly helpful.

Of course, it means some development is now on a tool instead of the game. But I see the tools as enabling development of the game.

Just for context, I have a fulltime job and only have about an hour a day to work on all these things (this website, https://openglreference.com, my own game), but I see the tools development that crucial to the success of the game.

Hotloading is another of those things that takes a bit of extra work to enable, but it pays off. Being able to see changes immediately in a game currently being played reduces iteration time considerably. When I've only got an hour here or there, being able to see the effects of changes immediately means I can do 5 iterations instead of 3 (just as hyperbole, but you get the point).


As for doing state machine, if it works, do it. Simple is definitely better, and you're right, if the players think it's working, then it is.

[Deckhead]

If it's working for you, great. Personally, probably due to time commitment, I get a bit lost if I don't have everything prepared and organised and known before hand. Not much done on feel, all done based on what I documented previously.

[Deckhead]

The way this worked is, I didn't know what I was doing at the start. I started every day working on it 2+ years ago and was amazed I made it 30 days in a row. This was just supposed to be something that got my mind off of my shitty career.

I'm pretty sure that's how like... 80% of us hobby devs got started. Definitely why I'm doing this, shitty day job is soul destroying.