Humanica News

[p]Hello, everyone! Today, I would like to summarize the results of the recent Steam Next Fest and discuss my plans for bringing the game to release. There will be fewer images and more text.[/p][p][/p][p]First, thank you very much to everyone who played the demo at the festival! [/p][p][/p][p]I analyzed all the feedback and identified the main problems in the game that can be fixed:[/p]

• [p]At the beginning of the game (the first few hours), there is too little content, and players get bored.[/p]
• [p]The pace of the game is too slow, settlers work too slowly, and the day passes too quickly. Often you just have to wait.[/p]
• [p]There is a lot of routine: it gets boring to constantly mark resources for gathering, assign settlers, etc.[/p]
• [p]The game is not very intuitive, the interface is uninformative. The tutorial is not clear enough.[/p]
• [p]Sometimes the AI of the settlers does not work well: they often carry items one at a time, search for food, tools, and resources in a suboptimal way, and search for available work in a suboptimal way.[/p]
• [p]Players cannot customize the game to their liking: there are practically no settings, no key rebinding, no difficulty settings at the beginning, no flexible map selection at the beginning.[/p]

[p]I will try to fix all these issues before release.[/p][p]
[/p][p]The release is scheduled for early 2026. I have about a few months to finish the game. Here are the new major features I want to implement:[/p]

• [p]Prosperity points system. The more technologically advanced the tools and clothing used by the settlers are, and the more technologically advanced the buildings you construct are, the faster prosperity points will accumulate each day.[/p]
• [p]Tree of Laws. Each law will make it easier to manage the settlement or simply give a permanent bonus. Examples of laws: automatic settlement of homeless people, the ability to produce items up to a limit, all residents behave as handymen if they do not have available work, etc. Laws will be purchased with prosperity points.[/p]
• [p]Annual plan system. These are essentially bonuses that last for one year. Each spring, the player will be able to approve plans by spending prosperity points. The set of available plans is very limited, but new plans can be found randomly on the world map.[/p]

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[/p][p]Also, I mustn't forget about improving the existing functionality. Here are the points I would highlight:[/p]

• [p]Improve the world map to make it more interesting and challenging to explore.[/p]
• [p]Improve fights with enemies so that they are not so simple and boring. Add more tower defense elements.[/p]
• [p]Add more QoL features that will simplify management: gatherers' huts, advanced priority settings, prohibiting residents from using certain tools or eating certain foods, baskets should be equipable and add new slots to the inventory, and much more.[/p]
• [p]Fix all the flaws that became apparent after the demo festival. 
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[p]To be continued![/p]

[p]The new demo is now available! Play it as part of the Steam Next Fest, which starts on October 13 at 5 PM UTC![/p][p]
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[p]Hello, everyone! Today I'm going to talk about how I created the world map.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Initially, the task was as follows: I needed to travel around the world map to add the feeling that the world outside the settlement exists and that something is even happening in it. This feeling was sorely lacking in the game that inspired me so much at the time - Dawn of Man. It's no surprise that my project has a lot in common with this game, but that's not what we're talking about right now. I chose a hex map format because I used to love playing Civilization 5. Generally speaking, at one point I hoped to create an analogue of Civilization, with development from the Stone Age to space rockets, but within a single settlement. Then I had to cool my enthusiasm, and I only developed it up to the Iron Age.[/p][p][/p][p]First, I started making a procedural hex map. I used the same methods as when generating the main map on which we build the settlement: we take Perlin noise of different scales and combine them. Each cell has its own specific landscape: plains, mountains, hills, forests, hills with forests, etc. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]After that, I added water and various objects: ancient ruins, herds of animals, neighboring settlements. Units can move across the cells themselves. At the moment, the only such unit is a squad of scouts controlled by the player. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]You can add a bunch of different mechanics to the world map, and there's a ton of potential for creativity, but I decided to stick with a few basic features because I have limited resources. At the moment, you can control your scout squads to clear various points of interest and find useful resources: new plant seeds for cultivation, new animals for breeding, and technological knowledge to unlock certain technologies. Essentially, these are just expeditions, like in Frostpunk.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]It took a lot of effort to implement a working hexagonal grid with the necessary coordinates. I also had to use some special features in the generation process. For example, to ensure that no objects spawned within a radius of 2 cells around the settlement.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Next, I added the ability to gradually reveal the map. All unexplored cells will simply be hidden. The further you travel from your settlement, the more valuable points of interest you will find.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Cells are opened through the unit view mechanism. Each unit has a view value, and each cell has a “view difficulty” value. Thus, units will see far across plains, but will not see through mountains.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And, of course, I implemented pathfinding on a hexagonal grid using Dijkstra's algorithm, because units will take longer to move across some cells (such as mountains), and I needed a way to automatically select the optimal route.
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]To send out scout squads, you simply need to build a scout camp and assign three settlers to it. Currently, this action costs a fixed 20 food. But in the future, I will make it so that the squads’ food runs out during the exploring. You will need to plan how to find useful resources and get the squad back home before they starve to death.
[/p][p][/p][p]To be continued![/p][p]
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[p]Hi everyone! The project is still alive and development is nearing completion. The release is scheduled for early 2026, but the exact date will be announced later. I'm also looking forward to participating in the Steam Next Fest. It's a good time to tell you what I've been working on for the last year.
[/p][p][/p][p]After a fairly long break, in November 2024, I continued to work on the game. The first big feature I decided to refine was agriculture. My goal was to make the gameplay cyclical through the seasons, where you plant wheat (or fruits and vegetables) in the winter and harvest in the fall. The interest of this mechanic is to have the player plan how much food to grow so that there is enough to survive the next year.
[/p][p][/p][p]I made universal garden beds, where you can choose what you want to grow. And all garden beds are automatically grouped together after being built, so that you can change from wheat to carrots in one click.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]And you also have to spend a unit of seed to plant a plant. The seed cycle is like this: spend a unit of wheat seeds to plant wheat, then harvest the crop and get the same unit of seeds. But if the player wants to increase the planted area, he can convert part of the harvest (the wheat itself) into seeds.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]In the next I polished visuals, tweaked post-processing, made the models of beds take the shape of cells in the construction grid. And in the end we have this picture.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]To be continued![/p][p]
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New demo version of the game is available for download!

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