Nova Roma News

[p]Hi Everyone![/p][p][/p][p]We’ve put a full day/night cycle in Nova Roma, and it has an important gameplay effect on your citizens' lives. All buildings begin and end work at different times: workers at shops and theaters sleep in a bit but work later, while bakers will have to get up very early. [/p][p][/p][p]When work ends, citizens need to walk home each night and get some sleep. Your city's design affects the length of their trip to and from work. If they can’t make it home in time they’ll get tired. Below, these workers have a job at a fishing hut very far from their home so they're not able to get enough rest:[/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p]If they spend too long walking to work, the productivity at that building will suffer. You can see this split on the 'Time Working' vs 'Time Commuting' bar in the UI. Here we can see workers are spending the great majority of their time walking to work instead of actually fishing. This is an important tool to diagnose production issues in your city, and of course the building itself will notify you of an issue using the thought bubble system: [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]To fix this commute issue, you’ll need to either improve your road networks so they can get to work faster by building better roads or you can build closer housing. Workers with bad commutes will automatically try to move closer to their work if there is available housing, so in this case it’s as simple as building some housing closer to the fishing huts.[/p][p]
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[/p][p]The day night cycle is also a fun way to simulate patterns of daily life and add more liveliness to your city. When folks are done with work they’ll visit a theater or shop in their idle time, before going to bed.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We didn’t want just a cosmetic change for day and night - we’re hoping these commute time mechanics add a little extra depth to your city’s layout and design. [/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p]Until next time![/p]

Hi Everyone,

We wanted to give another quick update on some of the cool things coming in Nova Roma, mainly how the water and terrain system affects soil fertility.

Crops need fertile soil to grow, and the more fertile the better the yield. Soil fertility is affected by a number of factors, but primarily it depends on proximity to fresh water. As the water flows through, the nearby soil becomes more fertile



Since the water is fully dynamic, this means you can change this if you can divert the flow of water. And of course, you can! Previously we’ve shown how you can build dams to change the course of rivers, but we are adding a feature that lets you modify the terrain, and thus the flow of water however you wish.

You can command your citizens to begin big or small earth moving projects. You can designate areas of the ground to be leveled out, dug into, or raised up.



When we bring all these features together, your citizens can dig out channels under your direction to allow water to flow through, quite literally irrigating the land:



We’re looking forward to seeing all the amazing stuff you’ll come up with!

Until next time!
-Pete, Michael, & Sam

Hi Everyone!

We’ve always found ancient Rome fascinating, especially the daily life and housing. In first hand accounts, original texts, and letters you can find they were very much like us. They had similar complaints about their apartment being too noisy, the roof leaking, or neglectful landlords.

There were a wide range of housing types in ancient Rome, from small homes to towering apartment buildings. We’re taking heavy inspiration from actual ruins and research to implement housing in Nova Roma.

[h3]Housing Types[/h3]
So far, we’re supporting a few different housing types:

• small houses
  
• apartments (insula)
  
• larger houses (domus)

The small houses operate much like you’d expect, you just need to satisfy their basic needs. The apartments and larger homes will need access to more resources and services beyond the basics, including access to aqueduct supplied water. They’ll also provide more tax revenue.

[h3]Mixed-Use Buildings[/h3]
One really interesting thing about ancient Rome was that on the ground floor of apartment buildings (and some domus style houses) there were shop fronts individuals could rent out. This mixed-use type building was very much like the kind you find in cities today.



We want to represent this in Nova Roma so we’ve implemented a new system in which you can make mixed use buildings. We’ve set up the apartment buildings with special slots on their ground floor available for shop placement.



[h3]Shops (Tabernae)[/h3]
You’ll be able to select different shop types to place inside these ground floor slots, everything from food courts to barbers. The apartment and shops are independent buildings. The shopkeepers may or may not live at the apartment where their shop is located, and they’ll need to go out and collect the resources they need to run their business.



We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the historical research on the types of businesses that populated these ground floor areas (you can read more about that history here). More historically inspired shop types will be coming later! On that note, a little disclaimer that we are not historians so some things may end up a bit different than how they actually were in ancient Rome. As game designers, we’re trying our best to balance the history with compelling gameplay.




Until next time!
-Pete, Michael, & Sam

Hi Everyone!

We’ve been working away on all aspects of Nova Roma, from the internal systems, map generation, water mechanics, and more. Last blog post we highlighted the dynamic, physically simulated water system. Today we want to show how that impacts your city.

Citizens living in higher end homes will need access to water, and water is also required to keep public toilets flowing and bathhouses operating. You’ll need to build dams to create reservoirs, then bring that water via aqueducts to town.

Because the water system is dynamic, building a dam has some challenges. How do you make sure your dam will keep the water where you want it? We wouldn’t want you to spend a lot of time working on a dam only to accidentally flood your city. To solve this problem, Michael has been working on a special Dam Planning Mode.



It allows you to add and remove dam blocks and runs the water simulation in a ‘preview mode’ so you can see how the water will respond based on the design of your dam. You can adjust how far into the future you want to see the water simulated.

Here I’ve set up a poorly designed dam, but the dam planning mode lets me know the dangers of my design. Buildings that would be hit and damaged by flooding water are highlighted red.



Now I’ve corrected it and I can see the water will be directed away from my town. When you’re happy with everything you can start your dam project and things should work just as you’ve planned. This allows you to build large dam projects without the fear of accidentally flooding your town.



To get the water to our citizens, we need to add a water tap. The water tap is a building that draws water from the adjacent dam and allows sediment to fall to the bottom. We’ll also need a water tower which will supply water to nearby houses and buildings. We connect these together with an aqueduct and since everything is physical, the aqueducts must run downhill.



You can also create more complex water networks using reservoir-like Water Splitters.



Each building in the system has information on the flow rate of the water coming in and going out. Houses, apartments, bathhouses, and more all draw from the flow of water so you’ll need to make sure you are piping enough in to keep everyone happy.



We’ll of course be iterating and polishing this further as we approach release. Our goal is that it should be a fun challenge to manage dams and water infrastructure to keep your city supplied with water as it grows larger and more dense.

Until next time,
-Pete, Michael, & Sam

Hi everyone! Nova Roma and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out!

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