Dev Diary #3

The game has not been updated for some time but don't be afraid there is a lot of things worked on behind the scene! I want the next update to be a big one with a lot of meat for people that already played Deisim for years and want a big bunch of new stuff to experiment.

The big news is that the next update will have animals. A new miracle will be available to you to create animal life on existing terrains. For that purpose I reworked the game to store more layers of information for each tile.



The Terrain layer contains the terrain info (Forest, Grass, Desert, ...)
The Building layer contains the information about Buildings in that tile (Town, Church, Pyramid, ...)
The Animal layer will contains the animals currently living in that tile (Deer, Wolf, Elephant, ...)
The Deep layer will contains information about non renewable resources that the humans will be able to extract from the ground (Coil, Oil, Gold, Iron, ...)

The resources system of towns has been completely reworked too to allow me to add a lot of new resources that will be gathered, traded and consumed by humans.

Animals will be renewable resources that move and react to their environment. Unlike trees and stone that never move animals will have their own (very simplified due to cpu limitations) Artificial Intelligence.

For example :

If the player build a big forest the deer will move from one Forest tile to the other providing resources to different villages depending of the time.

A Wolf will do the same but also eat the Deer removing the animals from the world.

A Shark will only move from water tile to water tiles and eat the fish or the humans that are on that tile.

The choice of the animal will not be given to the player directly but will depend on the terrain where the miracles is thrown and the miracle will cost a lot of mana. The forest will make a Deer and the Water will make a shark for example.

I think that this new system will add some interesting mechanics to the game and will create emergent behavior that will lead to interresting and fun situations.

Let me know what you think about that in the comments below. I hope you are as exited as me to see that in the game.