Cities n' Squares

Umanità now has square tiles, I've modified the hexagons to be squares by joining seven adjacent hexes together and then cutting out a square. However, at the moment the squares do not line up perfectly at their edges so some adjustment is needed.

No tile edges yet, but that should be easier with squares. Before getting to that, there is much work to be done on the game engine, city's populations need to be able to grow, the units dart around immediately when given orders - I only noticed that after a recent computer upgrade. Also there are some glitches in loading and unloading units from boats, still haven't figured out any good way to handle this efficiently and with a minimum amount of code.

More importantly, there are also some much needed low level refinements and efficiency improvements to be done.

Here's a pic of the city interface in its current state:

Credits to Freeciv for the unit and city icons.

Ciao!

Evolution

Since a last posted ages ago, there have been a number of changes and improvements. This post is to show the evolution of the game since last time.

Credits to Freeciv for the square tiles and units. Freeciv is an open-source 4X strategy game and an inspiration for me to make Umanità.

The hexagonal tiles and UI is entirely by me.

Here's a peek at the hexagonal tiles and how they evolved.

This is the latest version of Umanità. Yes it looks more basic, however, the game now has the beginnings of cities! For the time being I'm going to stick with square tiles as the hexagonal tiles, nice as they are, were giving me too many problems. Soon I'll modify my hexagonal tiles into square ones. So the tiles will look pretty much the same but square.

 

  

And here's some pictures of the dynamic UI under development.

Umanità: An indie 4X game

Umanità is a 4X game, this is a genre including games such as Sid Meier's Civilization or Civilization: Beyond Earth, the 4X stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.

Unlike many 4X games Umanità focuses on developing nations toward becoming a civilization. That is, to be civilized, or to be humane, thus Striving for Humanity.

Players can play the game as they would Civilization, building cities, armies, exploring and expanding. However Umanità adds the ability to create and shape cultures – perhaps vaguely similar to the affinity system of Beyond Earth.

The idea is that players can add or remove various “trends”, this isn't instant nor entirely within the players control however. Trends give bonuses and penalties to a culture, this both aids and handicaps nations with this culture – which is independent of nations in the game.

I'll explain more about the game in later blog posts. For now here are some old progress pics from several weeks ago. Since these pictures the game has been refined further.

Here is have a unit onboard a boat. At that time there wasn't anyway to tell that if boat had units onboard other than running the boat into land and seeing if the game asks "Make Landfall?"
In the current version of the game a little flag indicates that a boat has units onboard:

On the mainland you can see two units, one is “fortified” (makes a temporary wall for a small defense bonus) the other is on “patrol” mode, which sends the unit off exploring, or actually running around wildly. Eventually the automatic exploration code will be smarter than simply running around randomly.

Another Picture.

Here is the box that pops up when a boat unit runs into land. Rather than something more typical such as “Exit boat?” or “Stay with ships?” I used “Make landfall?” at my sisters suggestion.

There isn't any newer progress pics as-of-yet because the game is currently undergoing a major-overhaul: transitioning from square tiles to hexagonal ones.

The reasons to use hexagons rather than squares are many. One example is this: the distance from the center of a square to its corner is greater than the distance from center to edge.

So if a unit moves through the corner of a square it will travel farther than if it traveled through an edge.

Hexagons alleviate this problem by supplying six edges to travel through, this gives six possible directions to move in without needing to move over a corner. Compare this to the eight directions possible with a square if movement over corners is allowed.

Wrapping up. In the next couple of blog posts I will post pictures of the new hexagonal tiles, which are drawn entirely by me and are higher quality.

Credits to Freeciv for the graphics, the tile and unit graphics are excellent for a basic or retro civilization-type game.
All versions of Umanità are coded by me, only the tile and unit graphics is from Freeciv.

Until next time, ciao!