Godot Version
Godot 4.4
I know it’s a broad question, but I’m looking for some guidance in building a Colony Sim/Base Builder type game.
I haven’t fully fleshed out my ideas yet, but I’m thinking of a Spooky Victorian town, like a Bournville Model Village, but with Supernatural stuff.
I’ve watched some YouTubes from NanotechGameDev and FinePointCGI, which has given me a start, but I’m wondering what other resources are available.
I don’t want to go wandering off down dead-end paths, or re-inventing the wheel.
I’ve got a camera working, and a Building-Placer for Lumberjacks and Stone Cutters, which take resources to a central Stockpile.
Are there any places I can find hints, ideas, guidance on how to make a Colony Sim?
Once I’ve got a framework, I should be able to make it fit my plans.
There are lots of ways to tackle this, though I don’t offhand know of any guides or tutorials. Generally, you probably want to have simple, enclosed systems that run independently but can interact.
For example, you might have a system that is in charge of your trees. It would know what parts of the map have trees on it, and could watch the passage of time and make trees grow, or new trees sprout.
You could also have your lumberjacks, who know how to go find a tree, cut it down, and shuttle the wood back to some place (perhaps a lumberjack hut, maybe your stockpile, maybe the closest building the player has designated as log storage, maybe the nearest building that wants to consume lumber…
You could have (say) a lumber mill. The miller could know enough to get logs from storage, take them to the mill, then take the resulting lumber to storage.
Each little system is its own small, closed machine. Get resource X from a source, process it into resource Y, put it in a resource sink. A lot of the strategy of the game comes down to how the player makes these little machines feed off each other, balancing production and consumption.
You can complicate it by adding more inputs and outputs (like, say, buildings need staff, and those staff need food and water), but fundamentally it’s still the same thing; little simple machines that produce complexity through interaction.
1 Like
Thanks.
I’m trying to keep it quite simple for now, but looking ahead, I think I’ll need several categories of Citizen:
Resource Gatherers, that collect from existing places (trees, rocks)
Resource Makers, that work in their own place (Farms, orchards)
Manufacturers that convert resources.(Blacksmith, sawmill) - I can do one-type-to-another, but it looks complicated to do e.g. 3 Coal, 2 Iron to 1 Tool.
That seems workable. The main thing is, you probably want to keep the subsystems modular, with each one more or less running a loop that looks like:
- get source resources (if needed)
- process into product
- put product somewhere (if needed)
That, combined with a map that has resources and places to store resources, will give you a system you can use to lego together whatever sort of city builder/colony sim/base builder you like,
Hey, I just made a base builder template. Take a look, it might be useful:
1 Like
Thanks. I shall take a look.
Can you offer any quick tips for Base Building games?
My main inspirations at the moment are:
The Settlers
Timberborn
Pharaoh
and a few other 1/2-remembered ones! 