Kind Of Pretty Alright

I finished pillaging this weekend. All the core modes excepting tyrant creation are done now.

In the last game I played I pillaged The Hidden Veil (randomly generated nature faction) and captured two Wereshrooms. I then made these guys pillage the Monolithic Fortress to get me the stone I needed to build a gold mine. They tried to run away every so often, but my tyrant passed his terror check and brought them back. Meanwhile my kids worked a farm and lumber mill so I’d have some resources to build up my kingdom. Eventually the Monolithic Fortress had enough of this and sent in two guards, a hedge wizard, and a peasant who put an end to my Tyranny. I think I lasted about 10 years. A decent run with the balancing as it is now.

This weekend was super productive, but I’m still a bit disappointed. Right now marriages and kids are done (except for a few statistical tweaks). Also, the loyalty system is complete, so if you don’t feed or pay your followers, they’ll leave, unless your tyrant recaptures them before they run off.

I finished all the spriting and code for the resource harvesting tiles and structures. I think they all work too!

Today I finished the design for pillaging, but I’m only about halfway through coding it. Basically you take your pillagers and decide which attack lanes you want to pursue. Each lane may have a defender and a resource bundle. You can always be almost guaranteed to take away a few resources if you bring only one or two pillagers. However, once you start bringing more along your risk goes up in terms of suffering casualties. Of course you’ll steal more stuff if there are more people to carry loot away. Hopefully the new pillage system will be done by next weekend.

They grow up too. A bandit almost killed one of them, but then the kid actually bested the bandit in unarmed combat. Have to toughen up those bandits soon!

After getting some feedback on Tiny Tyranny, I think the right direction to move for the next version is to improve the core of the main manage/pillage/defend loop. This means adding all the basic buildings and making characters more interesting. I think I’ll begin this process continuing some of the UI enhancements I squeezed in at the end of the last sprint. I just finished updating the goals, which will as serve more of a list of things I don’t want to forget.

The thing that excites me the most of the next version is the character updates. Followers should be more interesting – have genders and relationships and potentially families. Working out the mechanics for how this works will be a little odd, but just maybe one roll a year to determine if characters marry should suffice, although you might get a bit intermarried depending how things work out. Then again it’s a tyranny simulator, so how civilized are you going to be anyway?