"Each building gets bonuses and penalties depending on what's built next to it."

Welcome, welcome, come in, make yourself at home.  Today I want to tell you all the tale of how grass grew on this island...

So yeah, we've been looking more at how to make the game look less flat, more alive for quite a while - stuff like adding clouds, improving the water and lots of tweaking to how things render that I've talked about in earlier posts.  To that end, this week I put in new trees and also covered all the empty tiles with grass!

That's starting to look really nice, I reckon.  Still need to improve the amount of variation - at the moment there are only three different 'grasses' - as you can see with the repeated large bush down the bottom right.  I'll be changing things so that the layout of the grass is randomised on each tile, which will help that a lot.

More graphical improvements are planned - particularly to the road tiles, so continue to watch this space!

There have been lots of little gains this week, including a new, much more intuitive, UI for selecting what building you want to construct, but the other big news this week is that I finally got around to adding a whole new gameplay system, for the first time in ages!

This system is 'Adjacency', and the idea is that each building gets bonuses and penalties depending on what's built next to it.  The system is just in it's infancy right now so it's not doing much yet, but some of the possible effects are:

  • Houses with another house next to them can hold an extra worker  
  • Houses with lots of houses next to them can hold even more workers (but have a penalty to happiness)  
  • Houses next to farms can store more food  
  • Houses next to empty space give their workers a happiness bonus  
  • Houses next to production buildings, especially polluting ones, give their workers a happiness penalty  
  • Farms next to other farms produce food faster  
  • Farms next to warehouses can store more food  
  • Woodcutters completely surrounded by forests produce wood more quickly

As you can imagine, the sky's the limit for what I can do with this!  So long as I balance it right, and make some of the interactions complex enough to take some thought as to what you want to place next to each other (and hide some sweet bonuses that you only get for unusual combinations of buildings), I think it's going to be a lot of fun to play with.