[WIP] Iso

bigbadwofl

Had this idea for a game yesterday. If any of you have played Ishisoft's Ludum Dare entry 'This Precious Land' you'll recognize this as it's basically a direct copy. The idea is that it will be extended to function kind of like a city builder in the style of Sim Farm but you'll place and upgrade tiles in this manner to build your farm/countryside. The map will keep expanding as you reach certain point tiers and you'll have to manage resources in an effort to get everything flowing smoothly.

Now that I've got the prototype out of the way, I can get back to working on VoA as the idea of building an Isometric game in Unity was keeping my mind too busy to focus. Speaking of isometric, please ignore the terrible mouse position to tile index approximation I've used.

http://bigbadwofl.me/Games/Iso

P.S. The directions may not be clear enough: you need to upgrade the dirt tiles enough times so they form a giant tree, at which point you'll receive a resource you can spend on water or rock.

P.P.S. I won't be doing any more work on this as I'm getting the VoA demo ready, but maybe this will entertain someone for a few minutes.

Tuism

I don't entirely get the logic behind the upgrading, I end up with a checkboard pattern of grass and dirt, and if I try to deviate from the pattern I get a grass. I guess I'm supposed to keep doing that. It's not obvious how it works to me, though @_@

HotClaw

Thanks for sharing the prototype! It's very similar to Triple Town. I played that game, loved it, got addicted, ran out of turns, bought infinite turns, and uninstalled it to prevent my own death. So hell yes please keep working on it!

bigbadwofl

Tuism said:

I don't entirely get the logic behind the upgrading, I end up with a checkboard pattern of grass and dirt, and if I try to deviate from the pattern I get a grass. I guess I'm supposed to keep doing that. It's not obvious how it works to me, though @_@

I agree, it's not very obvious how you should go about reaching higher tiles. The last tile you place will look at its neighbors and look for a tile matching the one you placed. You need to plan out your moves to avoid the checkerboard pattern. the dirt upgrade path goes: dirt, blades of grass, grass, small trees, big tree.

Sorry i couldn't make it easier to use. As I mentioned, it's only a prototype but if I should reach a point where I have some time off working on VoA, I'll get back to it.

EvanGreenwood

I like the combine-stuff mechanic... but I found that in ISO it is very hard to plan ahead. Without taking out a paper and pen I couldn't reliable produce a big tree (I could sometimes, but only 1 out of 3, so I did a lot of restarting).

I did work out how to make a big tree without reading your explanation. It is fairly obvious what to do, but I found it really hard to do it.

I don't really want to suggest an undo mechanic... because I'm not sure what that will do to the challenge... unless there is a way to cleverly gamify undo's (or add some interesting tile destruction mechanics, or add some tile shuffling mechanics).

I'm not sure if showing results of future moves might help make it more intuitive? (like a ghost of the result as you roll over).

I seem to feel that Leap Day ( http://www.leapdaygame.com/ ) had some problems with expecting the player to think unreasonably far ahead. Maybe they had an interesting solution to solving it? (I really don't know off hand)

I think Triple Town is a lot more intuitive because the position that you place things doesn't matter quite as much, so although planning ahead is necessary, it is more humanly possible. Maybe there's some rules for the combining that you can add/tweak to make it more forgiving/predictable.

Of course, I haven't played a lot of Triple Town, or games like that, so maybe there are some special brain pathways that those players have developed and ISO isn't actually going to be that challenging for them. I'm not really the audience for this game, so maybe I'm having a hard time because my brain has a Triple Town handicap.

Other things I might suggest! Does the gameboard have to be a fixed size? Maybe expanding outward with an ever growing forest could be fun (depending on what you want to do with the implied goals in the game).

bigbadwofl

Thanks for the detailed response!

Expanding the game board is definitely something I'd like to do.

Concerning how difficult it is to plan ahead, I think for my purposes I might only allow three or four upgrades instead of five. I don't know if you've ever played Sim Farm but what I'd really like to do is have a game where you build your farm with five types of tiles. Roads, Pasture, Crops, Buildings and Grass. Upgrading roads will grant you a surface that it less damaging to your tractors etc and upgrading your crops/pastures will yield more produce. So you'll be able to build a perfectly functioning farm without using any upgraded tiles but you probably won't expand very far.

Don't know if it's really a project I want to put lots of time in, especially with me working so hard on Vaults of Ashen. What do you all think, is this something you can see yourself playing?