Heads up:

Just as a warning, this devlog is going to be…mostly blood. So, if you don’t like that stuff, turn back at the halfway point (:

New input mechanics

You can now zoom in and out with PgUp/PgDn and +/-. Additionally, you can tilt the camera higher now.

This should help you to get better angles on things.

Finer-grained violence settings

I’ve split the Violence preference into two categories: graphic violence and aural violence.

Graphic violence affects the visuals. When set to Intense, you’ll get…a lot of blood! Setting it lower will clean things up.

Aural violence affects the audio. When set to Intense, crushed villagers will make all-new crackling sounds. Yum!

Slower slow macros

The Lumbering setting for macro speed is now a lot slower – the monster’s speed is divided by 0.8 + scale / 10. The macro’s scale starts at 6, for reference.

Side note: I adjusted how mass is calculated. This might lead to some weirdness with things being weirdly hard to eat/stomp/etc. More tweaks may be coming soon.

Better AI

The AI is a little smarter now. It can reassign villagers who are already tasked with building something (not in all situations, yet – only when a villager tasked with a distant building sees a very close-by one it can work on instead).

My notes say that I “improved town center placement”.

Speaking of such things, there’s a basic map generator now! It places clusters of resource patches in a big circle, along with one in the center.

Here’s the result of letting the game run for around 10 minutes. I spawned a bunch of villagers at the start – the AI expands when it has lots of them.

Note that I’m having occasional problems with the AI freaking out and issuing thousands of orders, making the game grind to a halt. It’s much rarer than it used to be, at least (:

Misc

I fixed UI scaling. You should no longer have your entire screen eaten by the statblock if you’re using a low resolution.

BLOOD!

A big mess

I decided to take a break from villager AI (which is going pretty well!) to work on some non-essential mechanics. This quickly spiraled into several days of work entirely devoted to blood and gore.

The first major feature is the “debris system”. It lets macros get debris stuck to various body parts, like their hands, feet, hips, etc. Currently, there’s only one kind of debris: blood. I might add more later, though.

As each part of the macro gets bloodier, splatters start to appear on its model.

These get more intense as more blood gets on them. If you really go over the top, you’ll eventually wind up making everything bloody.

Every time one of these body parts hits the ground, a splatter is created. This uses up some of the blood, so they get fainter over time.

These effects are only enabled if you have violence set to “intense” (see above for some new options in that department)

Trampling

The macro now automatically damages things it walks over.

This is a great way to get a lot of blood, very quickly.

Grab and Crush

A new ability for the macro lets it pick someone up and crush them in its hand.

This leaves blood on the hand, which can then get in the ground when using the Devour ability (but not Thrust, I don’t think. I need to work on that ability some more…)

What’s Next

I actually think this game’s getting close to a proper beta state. I’ll keep working on the AI, and probably work on the unit controls a bit. I want to be able to make villagers form a neat line to stomp along :3c