The storepage was updated but the video is still in Steams convertion queue for more than 30 hours. It is available on Youtube
Info about resources
It is not clear which resources are which or what buildings cost so this will be addressed soon.
The resources on the top are: Boards, Scrap, Plastic, Tarp, Food, Water The : grey piles provide: Scrap and Food
The : blue piles provide: Plastic and Tarp
The : brown: piles provide: Boards, Scrap and Wood (not yet necessary)
Changes
Game freeze fixed At least one cause of the citizens being frozen was fixed. We try to keep the game functioning at least so if this happens to you another time, try to save the game and reload it.
Corrupted savefiles can be loaded It is not trivial to make savegame data 100% accurate. Each time we add data or make changes to it we have to handle the saving and louting routine by hand for each value. We try at least to keep the errors minimal. At least some of the errors that occurred are now handled and it should be possible to load some of the savegame files which you could not load previously.
Feedback panel By default you send the latest logfile with the feedback system. It can be removed with a checkbox.
No need to email us or search it!
Also the character limit has been increased to 3000, 300 was a little too less…
Workshop can now be constructed The workshop could not finish construction because it required deprecated resources. As explained above, it is functional but not yet useful.
Upcoming Changes
We will focus especially on Usability and bugfixing before we add more content to the game.
Our goal is to provide a solid vertical slice, we do not believe that Alpha builds are an excuse for bugs and issues.
Info panel updates The panels which appear when you click on an object are not proper for all objects. We need to define more types of these windows for different objects and add more information.
Construction sites need info about which resources are missing for example.
Production tutorial The whole production system wasn’t explained and kinda has no use now anyway. We will make it useful and explain how it works in one of the next updates. It will be useful to make resources which you can not find in the environment and which you need for more advanced buildings.
Building information The construction panel will show which resources are required. An image of the building will come later in development, “KISS” you know.
Tooltips Introducing tooltips, e.g. for icons and buttons on the UI.
It's back!
About an hour ago we released the reboot version of Endciv.
Update:
The video is still in Steam's processing queue, it is unclear when it will be ready.
Tomorrow I shall be able to fix some of the nasty bugs that freeze the game or make the savegame unloadable. I was able to reproduce all of these issues.
Don't Buy It Yet
As I said some time ago, the current version is meant to show the existing players that the recent changes are not just thin air and it should show you where the journey goes and how the game has changed.
Therefore, I would like to make it clear that there is still some work to do to come up with real content. The game is on steam and I wish it wasn't there anymore but that can't be changed without burying it completely. But Endciv is Endciv, even if it takes a while I think we already stand out of the mass of abandoned titles as we try to get it done. In the end, something comes out, even though the way was hard.
I therefore draw attention to this fact in the Storepage which has been upated as well.
Publicity therefore is not what we actively do. The game has to develop until about spring 2019 before we start boosting the game more. So there are no press keys currently.
The Update
But to the essence. Some will have fun on this version, some may be disappointed. I hope you recognize the difference in quality. The game is much more robust and more intuitive.
Content is of course missing but the game should be running without major problems. If you get unplayable bugs, I'm asking for clues. Best if you use the internal feedback system.
Imagine elements like weather, the environment and graphics of the old version coupled with the new mechanics and UI. This is what you can expect and, of course, in addition to the features that have never been delivered
You can find the old version in the steam beta area:
The save and load function is now available, but as already described in the last news, there can be mistakes.
It's unfortunately late but the update was scheduled, a third time I won’t postpone it :) I'm excited for your feedback.
Everything's fine!
The last two weeks have been very productive. The game is very stable and it's fun to develop it again. How to balance and expand a game that only produces glitches after every little change. This was unfortunately the situation in the currently available version.
Of course, bigger bugs can still occur, but the foundation is solid! We can finally work more on extensions instead of running in circles as we did before.
The expected update is now planned for Tuesday. The current version is already fine, but there are still some needs, i.e. the tutorial has to be extended and a few missing UI elements have to be added. It is also intended to adjust the steam-page and the media contents.
Savegame
The save works well, but it can't be guaranteed at first that each game can be restored to 100 % or the larger bugs occur.
Just in the first days after new features have been installed there can be mistakes. Of course, we try to keep the problems low and the old scores can still be loaded for a while. Ideally, it should be possible at any time to receive the most important things, i.e. buildings, resources and residents.
However, after some updates, it will be useful to start a new game.
Recent Progress
A bigger functional update is that the citizens have a shedule over the day. At night they sleep and during hte day they take a little time off to eat and rest.
There's not so much to see though. This mainly includes the new user interface.
The feedback system in which you can send feedback or bug from the game.
The 3D artist has been briefed and the assets are planned, after a short vacation of his we will start at the latest in November. But we're still doing great with the previous assets and placeholders. Like here the shelter, the first residential stage, that's just a placeholder.
And you already saw this, but it is more refined:
A little more time
Hello together. Unfortunately, the deadline could not be met in September. There were some things that had stolen some time. My day job as very demanding recently. After all from November I work part-time and currently I have two weeks off :)
It is of course better if the first release includes everything it should have. Nevertheless, good progress was made in September. Some features have been added like the departure of buildings and the user interface has been extended.
Anyway, there will be the game version in two weeks, with update of the front page. The roadmap was recently updated as well. The page is not complete yet, but it's already showing the changes and content. http://www.endciv.de/roadmap
The new 3D artist will be briefed this and next week then we can finally start to creating the buildings. I think there is a good compromise on quality and flexibility, but more in a few weeks.
People in any case have some variations:
Current tasks are the citizen simulation. Currently they only work, but they still have to eat and drink and the resources have to come from somewhere. For example from the farmland and water collectors.
Hope you have some patience, thanks for your support.
Discord, price adjustment and current situation
I may have raised a few questions, so I would like to explain the current situation again.
Discord Channel
We are now on Discord! Join and get more frequent and exclusive Updates.
If you have questions and issues, feel free to post them there as well and I can react more quickly to those. https://discord.gg/ahazEZT
The Team
I don't work alone on the project, as I described it a while ago. I'm still working full time, but it changes in November and then I have about 30 hours a week available for Endciv. This will give the development a corresponding boost.
There has been a programmer for a few months now, serving up to 20 hours a week. It's the same I used to work with previously.
Besides there are some freelancers. Currently there is an animator and a 3D Artist, another one I have as a backup if we need more progress.
As I invest some time in preparing the art assignments it will take a while to finish new graphics.
The Price
With the release in September, the price will be reset to 16 USD. Currently there is still a discount since development was halted.
Recent Progress
My programmer is still fighting the AI Savegame feature as this turned out to be a big task but he shall be finished on Monday.
My drawing skills are limited but I do my best to brief the artists so they know what i have in mind. For the buildings we try to minimize modelling effort and texture space by reusing and replacing parts. We want to model seperate elements and later merge everything down to one mesh.
Today I managed to implement the character customization engine. We still miss a few textures and settings but overal it is working great.
As you can see the system can generate people with random colors for skin, hair and clothes. Of course it won't be that colorful later on.
Some news I wanted to tell you
We are working hard on the last features to publish a decent version at the end of September. As already said, it should include the main core features.
Not a Hobby anymore
As some may know, I'm still employed fulltime. That's why it took so long to come up with this relaunch. I can now tell you that I will have more time at the latest from November. Then you can expect more activity in regards of development and communication.
Therefore 2019 shall be the year when Endciv will finally become what it was supposed to be.
Remaining Tasks
Some of the tasks still to be done are the needs of citizens and balancing. There also will be a feedback and bug reporter in the game.
Even though many of the resources of the game are defined, the right approach has to be figured out in the following months. For example, the diversity of resources. Shall a building require 2 or 5 different kinds of resources to be build. In doubt, less likely is better.
Another part we are working on is the AI. It works well in general but only the savegame implementation is a little tricky but it looks good. Also the terrain engine from the old game has already been ported and should be finished this week, too. The first farm animals are in the making and the first crops will be able to grow soon.
The aim is to provide the early moments of the game as complete as possible. We even work on savegame downward-compatibility, so ideally every update can run each savegame. At least for a limited time.
In the end, a small tutorial will be implemented. That was certainly an aspect that was missing in the last game. There are still some things to do, but I am optimistic. If not everything is implemented by September, then it will be added quickly after. This time, due to the new code base, the daemon of bugs has a harder time :P
That still will change over the course of development, but yes less diagonals is better :)
Playable update in September
It is going to be closer for the first playable update of the new version of the game and September is set as a date. The update will replace the current game version, but I will keep it as an option in the Beta section of Steam for a short duration.
My goal is to show you how the changes affect the game positively in the long run. Even though this new version came out completely out of nothing, it shall provide more gameplay than the current version does.
The main tasks will be to collect resources, build shelters, produce goods and nourish your citizens. This version is mainly meant for you guys who already own the game. I can not yet predict how much fun it provides, but over the next couple of months it will grow continuously.
Differences from the old version
Keep in mind that this version will not include everything that you know already, such as the weather and daytime system, which anyway had no real impact. It will come later on, when it makes sense.
Farms for example are simplified to remove micromanagement. Previously you placed individual plants and even fences, now you only place a field and select the crop you want to plant.
I plan to have crops and cattle in the next version, but it might not yet be in the final state. So no animations for instance. Gameplay first.
UI Redesign
I made a new attempt on the UI design and this is what I came up with. Let me know what you think. It is not final but shows the overall direction.
I would especially be interested if you think that the Options menu has too many diagonals :) The checkboxes are still placeholders anyway.
Roadmap and Shop-Page
Before the new version is out I will also update the frontpage on Steam. The Roadmap on the website requires a bit more work but it will also be done within Fall.
Early Access
To participate in development, I plan to add a feedback system into the game. So you will be able to report a bug or feedback with just two clicks (and some writing) right in the game. This feature might not be available in the first version. I hope that this makes it easier for both sides.
Recent Progress
There wasn’t much more visual progress. The people are finally rigged and animations are in progress. Also some new buildings are ordered and shall be ready before the release.
This week we will finalize the AI system, it is the backbone of the project and requires a few more touches. The pathfinding was improved and is using C# Tasks now. Linux tests will be also made this week.
For the next Update I have some exciting news, you will like it ;)
Playable update is getting closer
Hey Folks. We are making great progress now!
June was not a good month, there have been a few things to deal with like a new computer to set up and I got surgery, but just removal of metal parts. Also a bit of time went into setting up tasks for artists, one of witch I am still waiting for a reply and maybe I need another one.
This week we will tackle Construction, Resource Gathering and just today finalized Production.
Resource management
Here is the new Production UI. Other than issuing individual goods per workbench or citizen, you will have one window to define how many resources should be produced. I plan to include 2 sliders, a min and a max amount value, here is how it should work.
When your total storage of a good is above max amount then the resource will not be produced. When it is below we will calculate a priority of this resource, so the production workers can choose which resource to produce next. In general, the higher the gap between available amount and max amount the higher the priority is. With the min slider you can even add priority, as the gap between it and available amount will also be included. All resources that are below the min value will be produced first.
And to not limit production to just one resource we add currently produced items into account, so if 2 or 3 lines of production already produce an important material, the next worker might choose another material. All is just done in one simple formula.
I also plan to include helpers to the UI, e.g. when your storages grow you should not have to increase each individual slider to match your storage capacity, same when your storage shrink.
Similarly, the Trading window will be, here you adjust amount which can be sold and a reference price. Players of Anno (aka Dawn of Discovery) might be familiar with this.
Content improvement
I was able to revert some of the old assets to the new project. I had to make some adaptions but overall they fit in quite nicely. The placement system (how you place objects on the grid, and which grid size to use) was now finalized today. I am much happier with this than it was previously.
I think I even solved something that was never quite right. When you build your city you will go over different stages, first you have these weak tents, then your ugly, slum like shacks and later you can afford some more comfortable houses. The shack like buildings so are what is most interesting to me personally, you should be able to trade space vs quality of living and other negative aspects like hazard of illness and fire. Look at this image, it looks like a mess, but each house can be reached by just a small corridor. You are free to leave one or two tiles more between the buildings though.
Here is another image, not all of these things like the animas work already, but I wanted to make an impression of what we are going to tackle this and next month. I do plan to have everything working which you can see right there, including electricity which I missed to add to the image.
Finally, here are some of the humans, textures are in progress now.
I know it is about time to get the first update out and I had a personal deadline for fall. We are working hard the next two months and I am at least trying to make this update in August for you to test. I believe, even when not everything is in place you will notice quickly why this step was done and where the game is heading now. One reason to have it released a bit later might be to add some more info like a simple tutorial, because I had to learn that shipping a tutorial of some kind is very important, even or especially at this early stage.
Characters and important features
Hello Everyone.
April was a productive month. We managed to get more basic systems in place such as the main menu and a proper loading and exiting routine which is not as trivial as it might sound.
Savegames and settings
Another point was the whole user settings. We can store and load settings and savegames for multiple users. Savegames will also have backward compatibility as this game is in constant progress during the alpha. We do that by simply having a converter from one version to the next once something has changed. Of course, just basic UI but it does its job.
Character models
I also hired a 3D artist who is doing the unit models. It is important to get the workflow final right now. The ideas I had for the characters previously were rather complex but in hindsight, as many things, some aspects are unnecessary. You can barely see any close details at the scale we are going to have. I wanted to be able to show starving people by actually making them thinner for example. But before I wrap my head around that lets first implement all that, it would still be possible to do it if it turns out to be a good idea, which I doubt.
Still I wanted to have variation and flexibility, so I came up with a modular system that is not too complex. We only use 4 mesh and texture parts that are combined on runtime: body, head, hair and misc (accessories like hat, backpack or additional clothing). We can define rules and presets on which parts are going to be combined. So a butcher at to work can look appropriately and when he goes home he could wear normal clothes again.
Each part has its own texture and all are packed in one quadratic texture. We target 512 pixels but for the game 256 pixel is enough so we have room for other purposes like close-ups or citizen portraits. Each part has UVs that match the smaller textures simply to make texturing easier, to prevent errors and simply stay more flexible. Most humans stay below 800 triangles and we can implement LODs if we have to.
Game economy
We still gnaw at the whole production process. For sure we did other things this month but it also turns out to be more time consuming as intended. But we are close to the goal, the AI system is in place and citizens successfully transfer resources form a storage to the production facility. All we got to do now is to start production and put those resources back to the storage. The whole AI decision is in place like when to get resources from where based on what should be produced.
A bunch of resources and products are in place. One that is working I will go and port over the old terrain system and distribute some resources which can then be gathered.
Gameplay wise we will then be equal to the current version of Endciv. The UI is another big topic but it should grow over the next two months as well. Before that I will update to Unity 2018 as there are quite some new features that we should build on.
We are two again
Hey everyone. It’s time for an update. For my excuse, we are very busy right now to get the main game mechanics done. Yes, you read right, I hired one of the former programmers of Endciv again and he will help me for at least half a year from now on.
Also he is a good programmer and not the reason why everything was so broken last time.
For task management I moved over to HacknPlan, I recommend that for other developers. It has all the basics of Jira while not being so complex.
We implemented a few basics like the save game system, player configuration and the inventory system. The latter one took some more time but will never annoy us again, it works great. In fact it is very similar to the previous one but all the pitfalls were removed.
Production System
The current goal is to get the whole production loop in place, today we implemented the basic system. But in order to get that far I spend a lot of hours simply on writing that system down. It might sound straight forward but there are many tiny details that have to be covered.
One of those things is logistics. I wanted a system that is not too simple because that can lead to inefficiency and illogical behavior. On the other hand, a too complex system takes more time and planning and is prone to issues. The system I came up with I think is a great foundation.
One uniqueness of Endciv compared to most other games might be that we have multiple production facilities which can produce a number of different goods. Also one facility will be able to produce more than one of those at once e.g. by having space for one or more workers. I call that production lines.
The player will now mainly tell on a global level how many resources should be produced at any time. So you can define that 20 tools should be in stock all the time, if that is not the case then it will be produced. In addition, you can always add specific tasks like produce 10 mechanical parts and prioritize all tasks and resources.
One critical point was how to actually manage that.
First point was how to tell which resources to produce. I believe that if you have 60/70 of product A but 2/40 of product B then B should be prioritized. I came up with a formula that does that, but of course it requires some balancing. But here it is:
Comparing priority = priority * (batchesLeft / MaxAmount)^activeLines
What it basically does is that if no facility is producing a resource then base priority is taken for comparison. Then the more facilities produce that same resource the less likely it is to be taken by another facility.
Another issue connected to that was how to manage logistics to provide the right amount of resources. A production facility ideally runs all the time and gets provided with resources. On the other hand, one facility should not take all the resources that would then not be available for another facility. To solve that we divide those tasks in batches which will be increased before the facility runs out of resources. That way two facilities can easily produce either the same resource or different ones at once.
About Programming
The whole coding rebuild turns out to be great. The Entity-Component pattern is a great relief. It never was that easy to implement independent modules like debug and cheat codes so easily.
Without going too much into detail (let me know if I should) having a System that uses static methods for all the major game logic makes it very easy to implement modules like this.
From each space in code I can simply call InventorySystem.AddResources(inventory, resources) for example. Before you protest, this is not a Singleton pattern. All those methods simply perform logic based on the parameters. The alternative might be calling inventory.AddResources(resources) but that would include logic in the model classes. Some of those methods do require an initialized system but we make sure that there is no Entity before there is the according system.
Again, if you are interested in those kind of things, let me know and I will focus on those things more often.
