TBC Log 4/3/2024

So this last week has been all about cameras. How does the camera zoom in? What angle is the camera at when zoomed in? How far away is the camera when zoomed in? Does anything interrupt the player’s ability to zoom in? What level of intimacy with the selected creature am I attempting to evoke when the player’s zoomed in? And then there’s all the questions about zooming out… What angle are we trying to get on the map in totality when the camera’s zoomed out? If TBC is a God Game, how much genre convention are we trying to stick to when zoomed out (the answer is zero, because when we’re zoomed out I’m trying to somewhat evoke the bisection of an ant hill you sometimes see in zoos)? My friend VM recommended this god game, Oxygen Not Included, that has a similar ant-hill vibe, similar to that of Fallout Shelter or XCOM2. I guess TBC is Similar to these perspectives while zoomed out, but ultimately while zoomed out the player is looking at the map from a front, -10 degree pointed down angle. And the camera style is certainly not orthographic, like these other games. It would be such a funky idea if the zoomed out camera were orthographic and the zoomed in camera were in perspective view. It would probably be nauseating. I don’t even know how I’d make the switch, I don’t think there’s a variable that’s like “on a scale between orthographic and perspective camera views.” Like I’d just have to make the camera do a hard switch when the lerp that controls its position hits 50%. Another facet of the cameras…. what can the player do when they’re zoomed out/in? What zoomed out/in percent should the camera be at when the player is visited by one of their Conduits, what percent should it be when a creature gives birth? How up close and personal are we getting at when two creatures catapult themselves into a duel for power? So, yeah. Lots of camera stuff.

You may ask, “Why has Abby spent so much time on camera programming?” Or you may not, but either way I will elucidate. So there’s this person named Seb who has been doing freelance 2D art for me. We are first working on the start screen, to solidify the game’s visual identity, ideally. We agreed initially that there should be trees bordering the start screen… recently for the trees I’ve sent them a reference to the game “Virtual Villagers 5 (The Tree Of Life), to use as a style reference for the bordering trees. Along with that, Seb showed me a few sketches of the start screen utilizing both different 2D visual elements and potentially different perspectives that could be used to view the elements at the center of the screen. So thinking about the start screen perspective had me start thinking a lot about the player’s perspective in the game generally. I spent like, two weeks trying to implement a player perspective only from the “anthill” perspective, but this ended up messing up so much stuff in the game I’d already made… the marionette had to be thrown out the window, so the player could no longer pick creatures up, the ardent circle in the middle was difficult to view and understand which creature was selected. This all went to bunk, eventually, but the simultaneous change I was trying out, to have the player control zooming in and out solely with the middle mouse button, was implemented into the original camera perspectives and works really well! Sadly, I did have to watch 3 days of work go down the drain. But that happens a lot in game dev (or at least in my game dev experience), you iterate as you figure out what happens to be good and remove what ends up taking away from the game.

I’ve honestly gotten so sick of camera stuff that I’ve started to implement other systems… the system I’m focusing on now is the “Natural Disaster” system. The thought is this: the player has a set of buttons they can pick from, if they pick one it’ll schedule a natural disaster for three days from the time it was picked. If the player shares this information with the Conduit creature before the disaster strikes, and the conduit has time to “spread news throughout the clan” about the upcoming natural disaster, then when the disaster happens, creatures affected by it have their “belief in player’s existence” stat go up. Currently, I have no functionality for what this stat does outside of this situation, but I have an idea that like, the conduit can maybe seize power as clan leader from the ardent, and the clan can become a “spiritually-based clan”? That’s just an idea. I’m still poking it around in my brain. Maybe the creatures try to contact me through all-clan rituals if they believe in the player’s existence enough, or maybe there’s a win-stat that’s separate from accumulating drama that affects how well the player does? That feels somewhat counter to the entire conceit of the game otherwise, where everything is meant to build drama right before the Ardent dies. Obviously, lots of thoughts and ideas are floating around in my head about this. To be honest, I’m just glad to be thinking about something that isn’t a camera.