Blue and Orange Part V

Now, this is the one thing which, like, a year ago, I thought would be the greatest addition to Black and White (I hadn't actually played the game at the time, I was just toying with the idea). The Caste System.

Castes have Requirements and Dharma. Requirements are, as you might think, the things you must be or do to be a member of the caste. The Dharma is things you either have to or get to do as a member of that caste. Everything that's a Requirement can also be a Dharma, but some things (race and gender come immediately to mind) can only be a Requirement, because you can't really change them about a person.

So, Requirements include: Being of a certain race (where race means culture in general, not just skin color: Picts and Gauls would be separate races even though they're both white), being of a certain gender, having a certain job, living in a certain kind of house, being of a certain age, having committed a crime, or any combination of the above. You can set Requirements to be either "X and Y" or "X or Y." It's possible to have a person who fits all the requirements for two separate Castes. In this case, they'll be sorted into whichever Caste is highest on the list. A villager can't belong to more than one Caste. You start with one Caste called "Villagers" which has no Requirements or Dharma and is automatically the bottom of the Caste list. The name and Dharma can be changed, but the Requirements (or rather, the lack thereof) cannot, and it can't be deleted. This way, if a villager goes through the entire Caste list and doesn't fit any of the Requirements for your custom-built Castes, they end up in the default Caste.

Castes effect how happy your citizens are, and if the caste system makes your citizens happy or unhappy, it effects how good or evil a god you are. So if you have a caste system that makes some citizens a little bit unhappy and all the rest very happy, it'll push you in the direction of being good. If you have the reverse, a small, happy upper class and a vast, miserable slave caste, it'll constantly push you in the direction of being evil.

How good or evil your caste system is can be measured based on two things: Fairness and Equality. A Caste system is Fair when moving from one Caste to another is something that can be done under your own power, for example if the Requirements of being in a Caste are that you have a certain job or that you've committed no crimes. A Caste system is Equal when none of the Castes get rewards like having a better house or immunity to certain crimes for having a different Caste. The unhappiness generated by being in a worse position due to an unfair or unequal Caste is greater than the happiness generated by being in a better position, however if you only have so many Palaces to go around, the happiness generated by having people live in them will usually outweigh the unhappiness generated by having others live in comparatively worse housing. An unequal or unfair system's unhappiness will be greater if the two different Castes live in the same village.

Now I have a request from my readers (both of you). I want you to find a way to break this system. Find a way that you could make a horrible society that the system would still read as being fair and equal, or find a way that you could make a utopian society that the system would read as being unfair and unequal.

Blue and Orange Part IV

So, on to the tech tree, and then maybe we can move on to social structure after that (so we'll be getting to inter-culture interaction sometime around Part VI, I guess).

Now I've written myself into a bit of a corner concerning the tech tree, because the University is a tier-five building, in a seven tier system. What's their left to research by the time you've already got tier-five buildings? Of course, some of the examples I give were things which basically made existing buildings more effective, instead of unlocking new ones, but that's all the kind of stuff that'd be very useful during base construction, and not so much after. Not to mention several technologies, like irrigation, came around long before a well-educated upper class was established. Now granted, this is a game where you play as a god who's very much fond of divine intervention, so historical accuracy isn't exactly a necessity, but still, that's a pretty big discrepancy and one that'll be hard to ignore for anyone who has any idea of how societies typically evolve.

So I've decided that the Sanctuary can be used for several things in addition to simply housing your godly presence and allowing you to manage your villagers using the almighty power of pie charts. It should also act as emergency housing, so you can sustain a small village population even if all other houses are destroyed, it acts as a fully functioning temple (so you won't need to build a second temple in your capitol unless it's a really, really big city), and actually generates more prayer power per worshiper than regular temples do, and it can also be used as a carpenter's shop to construct scaffoldings, though villagers cannot worship while the sanctuary is being used as a shop. It will also act as a university before you can actually build a university. Temples can also serve this function. If you don't have a university in the same town as a temple or your sanctuary, your priests will spend some of their time studying instead of worshiping.

There are seven tiers each in three different disciplines, each discipline being independent of the others. In your sanctuary, you can tell individual temples and universities to focus on a specific discipline or set of disciplines, or you can let the priests and scholars study whatever they like. In this case, the rate of study will be faster because they're pursing their own interests, however it will also be random.

The disciplines are Philosophy, Mysticism, and Science. Before I list off all the different technologies/theories that can be researched, I should note a new mechanic I'm introducing, crime. If an individual villager is unhappy enough, he may begin to commit crimes, like destroying property, stealing from other houses, attacking villagers if he finds them alone, or becoming an apostate and acting as a missionary for rival gods or atheism. If a happy villager sees a crime occurring, they'll call for help and then rush to stop it, drawing the attention of other villagers and soldiers in the area who will also attempt to thwart the crime. If the criminal is caught, he will be sent to a farm, logging camp, or mine for forced labor, imprisoned in a barracks or fortress, executed, or rehabilitated at a temple or the sanctuary, depending on the severity of the crime and how your village in general is run. You can also hand down a doctrine concerning which punishments should be administered to what criminals (including no punishment at all, in which case even happy villagers will simply ignore the crime) from the sanctuary.

The last four tiers of Philosophy can only be researched at a university. The last four tiers of Mysticism can only be researched at a temple or sanctuary.

I'm also adding a new building, one which automatically spawns: the graveyard. When a villager dies, the villagers will automatically bring them to a graveyard to spawn. If you're a creepy god (malevolent or not) you can use a sanctification miracle to turn any location, including a graveyard, into a site of worship where your priests and villagers will go to pray or conduct rituals which grant you Prayer Power. You can also use graveyards to cast various death-related miracles. Depending on what doctrines you have, villagers will treat corpses differently. If there's a large number of corpses, as from a battle or a plague, they may simply gather them up or burn them, or even just leave them there if no one lives nearby. Elsewise they may dig a mass grave. Dropping a scaffolding on a graveyard will turn it into a mausoleum, which is basically the same thing but fancier. Dropping a pile of wood or stone onto a graveyard along with the scaffolding will turn it into a catacomb, which will allow you to build other buildings on top of it (and people will continue to bury the dead in the catacomb, which will cause it to expand slowly outwards). This will steadily decrease the happiness of any villager standing on top of the catacomb by a very small amount. If they live and work above the catacomb all day, this will cause them to be constantly less happy than they otherwise would be.

Science:

1) Ranching, which will allow farmers to start keeping cows and horses on their farms, thus allowing you to butcher cows for a significant increase in food and raise horses for use by traders, missionaries, and cavalry.

2) Irrigation, expanding the amount of farmable land surrounding water sources.

3) Medicine, which makes illness less rare and villagers more likely to recover from it without divine intervention. This will also make them less fearful of plagues sent by you or any other god.

4) Steel, making all metal tools, weapons, and armor more effective.

5) Architecture. This will increase the health of all your buildings.

6) Crane. All construction will go faster when you have one of these handy.

7) Alchemy. This will allow your villagers to convert metal into gold and vice versa at will.

Philosophy:

1) The Glory of Man. This is the concept that the human body and mind are beautiful, incredible things. This concept is what set Greece apart from other civilizations of its era. It increases the happiness of all your villagers.

2) Moral Justice. This is the concept that some things are inherently just, regardless of what can be measured or enforced. It decreases the odds that a dissatisfied villager will turn to crime.

3) Logic. This is the basic concept of using connecting two true premises using valid logic to make a sound argument. It increases the efficiency of all village activities.

4) Harmony. The concept of living in balance between submission and aggression, and that all good and bad things in life will even out in the end. This makes your villagers more resistant to conversion by fear.

5) Personal Virtue. The concept that by being more virtuous personally, you will cause a ripple effect that will make all the world more virtuous as well. This makes your villagers more resistant to conversion to other gods or atheism.

6) The Rights of Man. This is the concept that all human beings deserve certain rights like freedom and safety. This will make your missionaries more effective and make all villagers in towns that your priests or missionaries have recently visited more likely to apostatize instead of committing other crimes when they're unhappy.

7) Political Philosophy. This is several different non-dictatorial methods of governing. This enables the villagers to elect their own leader if the city hall is currently empty. Having an elected leader will increase villager happiness.

Mysticism:

1) Visions. The ability to receive visions from a god (you). This reduces the cost of setting villagers as disciples and changing doctrines.

2) Afterlife. A knowledge of whatever kind of afterlife your worshipers get when they die. This increases a villager's resistance to conversion by all methods.

3) Ancestoralism. The belief that you can receive blessings from ancestors. This removes the happiness modifier for being near a mausoleum or over a catacomb (graveyards are unaffected), makes sanctifying mausoleums and graveyards cheaper, and increases the power of miracles that involve blessing or cursing villages (which increases or decreases their work and/or battle efficiency).

4) Divination. The ability to predict the future based off of the entrails of a sacrificed animal or by throwing bones, runes, or some other otherwise random method of determining things. This provides a small, immediate happiness or fear boost whenever you cast a miracle that occurs over time (like a blessing, bountiful harvest, or plague).

5) Mythology. A series of legends and stories concerning heroes and monsters who may or may not have actually existed. Reduces the upkeep costs for all Avatars.

6) Communing. The ability to communicate with otherworldly spirits, like angels, demons, animal spirits, the dead, etc. etc. This reduces the cost of miracles relating to raising the dead or unleashing a horde of angels/demons/animals on other villages or your own.

7) Clergy. A hierarchical system of determining who is in charge of running a church. Improves the efficiency and increases the happiness of priests and missionaries in all of their activities.

Okay, so next up we're getting around to one of the ideas I had from the start but haven't gotten around to writing about until just now because I've been busy laying the groundwork in other places: social structures and the caste system. I'll probably cover doctrines in the same post. Then after that we can move on to war, Avatars, and trade/peaceful conversion.

Blue and Orange Part III

So we have a plethora of different resources, which are harvested by various different villager actions. And so far, we have a vague idea of what kind of miracles we have to use. There's basically two things I want to get out of the way now. First, buildings and the tech tree, and second, the structuring of society. This may end up taking more than two actual posts. Regardless, once we get these two things out of the way, we can start talking about how gods interact with each other and with atheist villages. And then maybe we'll get working on different cultures.

Now, what kind of buildings do we need, and how will we build them? We could let villagers build them all automatically, but that will inevitably lead to player frustration when the villager could really use an extra farm or two in order to build up a surplus of food, but the villagers won't build them because they don't know the player is planning something that will require extra food, and the player, who is supposed to be a god, cannot communicate to them that they need to build more farms. So we need the player to be able to build things himself if he wants to. Black and White did this with scaffoldings, which were made out of wood (Black and White has no stone resource) at a certain building. Which building you made was determined by how many scaffoldings you dropped on one spot. The problem was, you could only hold one object at a time. There was no way to pick up several villagers, objects, or scaffoldings at once. This means that if you wanted to build a six-scaffolding building on the other side of your village from the scaffolding-maker, you'd have to drag yourself across the village six times.

We can resolve this problem by just allowing the player to pick up more than one object at a time. Black and White couldn't do this because you had to left-click to grab the ground and pull yourself around to move, and right click picked things up and put them down. We can simply have movement dictated by the arrow keys as in most games with a bird's eye view, make left click pick things up, and right click drop them. Now you can pick up as many scaffoldings at once as you need to.

Now, then, a single scaffolding will create the simplest building possible, a cottage. Adding extra wood to a cottage will make it bigger, but allow it to contain more people, becoming more and more space-efficient as you add more wood. First, it'll turn into an apartment, then a tenement, and finally a slum. Obviously, people are unhappy to live in these places, and get less happy the bigger and more cramped it is, but you can cram more people into a smaller space this way. If you add gold instead of wood, you'll get the reverse effect, houses that are less space-efficient but more pleasant to live in. You'll start with a manor, then get an estate, and finally a palace. Mixing it with metal yields a rampart, stronghold, and citadel. These are better places to live than the slums, but not by much, and more space-efficient than the palaces, but not by much there either. The advantage to citadels is that they're really, really hard to destroy.

Two scaffoldings gives us resource buildings, a farm if dropped on farmable ground, a fishery if dropped on the shoreline, a logging camp if dropped within ~20 feet of a forest (not just a single tree, but a forest), and a mine if dropped on top of a stone/gold/metal quarry.

Three scaffoldings mixed with some metal will give us a blacksmith to make tools and weapons, mixed with some raw wood or stone will make a carpenter to make more scaffoldings, mixed with gold will give us a building that makes luxury items (which luxury item it is depends on the culture of the village it's located in), and mixed with food will give us a stable where they'll raise horses.

Four scaffoldings mixed with gold will give us a marketplace that allows our village to trade with other villages we control as well as villages belonging to friendly or neutral gods, mixed with metal will give us a barracks where we can recruit soldiers to "persuade" villages to convert, and mixed with raw wood or stone will give us a temple. So far, I've used the word "temple" to refer to the headquarters of your entire religion, but I'm going to use the word "sanctuary" to define the headquarters now, and "temple" will be a lesser religious structure that makes missionaries to convert other villages peacefully, and gives converted villages a place to worship.

Five scaffoldings mixed with gold will give a university, which will make everyone who attends it happier and will also research and unlock technologies that will make things easier, for example inventing a crane will reduce construction time, inventing steel will make tools and weapons more effective, and inventing irrigation will expand the amount of farmable land next to water sources. Mixed with metal will give you a fortress, where you can recruit elite units to fight for you. Fortresses can also be manned by archers recruited at a barracks, resulting in a very dangerous, very hard to kill building. Mixing five scaffoldings with wood will result in a town center. If you have a powerful army, one of your generals will take up residence in the town center, claiming control of the village (though he'll still be loyal to you). Otherwise, the people will elect someone to lead them. If a general takes control of the village and you don't want him there, you can yank him out of the town center and the people will elect someone instead. If the town center is empty and you put someone inside it, that person will become the new theocratic ruler of the town.

Six scaffoldings makes a town square, where your people will gather for holy days, festivals, public executions, etc. This will significantly increase the effectiveness of these events in either satisfying or terrifying your people. Or both.

Seven scaffoldings along with extra wood, gold, and metal will create a monument. What exactly the monument is varies from culture to culture, but it's going to be something along the lines of a wonder of the world. This makes almost everything work better. Your soldiers will be slightly more powerful, your workers will work slightly harder, your people will be slightly more happy/scared of you when you perform miracles, your miracles will last slightly longer, effect a slightly larger area, and be slightly be slightly more effective, and so on and so forth. It's very expensive, but can give you quite an edge over other gods who don't yet have one. Each new monument you construct will provide only half as much benefit as the one before it.

Blue and Orange Part II

So I've dubbed my Black and White rip-off "Blue and Orange," because TVTropes references are the seeds of all good video games made in the history of forever. Including the ones made before TVTropes was created.

Anyways. We have our two basic kinds of resources, that being Prayer Power which is used for practically everything and various physical resources that are used for specific jobs, like constructing buildings or making tools. There's actually a third resource, though. People. You need villagers to harvest the physical resources and generate Prayer Power, and you also need villagers to convert raw materials into useful items. Not to mention, if you plan on going to war, you need villagers to recruit into your army. So we have three basic kinds of resources, then. How do we acquire these resources, then? I actually half-answered this in the last post.

Prayer Power, as mentioned, comes primarily from two sources. You can either generate a steady supply from worship, or you can get an instant boost from a sacrifice. There's three kinds of sacrifice. The first is stored food, which isn't worth much (for example, a miracle for causing a bountiful harvest requires less Prayer Power than the extra food gathered will generate if sacrificed, but a miracle for simply generating extra food will cost more). The second is live animal sacrifices, and the younger the better. The most valuable is human sacrifice, and again, young is good. People only reproduce when well-fed, and regularly sacrificing your own villagers isn't going to make up for the food surplus required to get people breeding in the first place, however you can always force people to breed by assigning breeder disciples (sacrifices also make a good way to drive a recently converted village to extinction if you're evil enough to practice genocide).

If you're a benevolent god, villagers will occasionally worship at your shrines automatically, by doing some kind of dance kneeling and saying a quick prayer when they aren't busy doing something else. This is a very irregular source of Prayer Power, however, which is why any god, good or evil, is going to need to turn some of their villagers into Priests (which is being used as a unisex term here). Priests job is to worship at the temple all day, every day, and they generate much more Prayer Power than others. Further, a sufficiently advanced clergy will lead the other villagers to worship together on holy days, generating massive amounts of Prayer Power in exchange for calling off very nearly all village activity for the day.

The rest of the village, meanwhile, needs food, which is provided by farmers, ranchers, and fishermen. You also need wood or stone, which is provided by lumberjacks or miners, and these are used to actually build things by laborers. Gold and metal will also be harvested by miners working the right type of mine. Gold and metal will then be processed into luxuries, tools, and weapons by craftsmen. Villagers who have not been set as disciples for a specific task will usually float around from one village job to the next based on the current needs of the village. Inside the Temple, which acts as headquarters for your entire empire/religion/whatever, there are pie charts of the current breakdown of which villagers have what job in which village. You can use these pie charts to increase or decrease the general amount of villagers working one particular job (taking or giving villagers to all other jobs equally), or else transfer villagers straight from one job to another. There's a few more village jobs not related to resources, but we'll get to those later.

The final village job to do with resources is breeders. Although people will start breeding on their own, you can designate someone as a breeder in order to speed the process up. Obviously, we're going to need some Virtual Villagers-style censoring to prevent this game from getting itself an AO rating.

Test Post

This is a test post to see how interesting/comprehensible my game-maker ramblings are to non-game-makers and even non-gamers.

A bit of preface to this one, since it's just a copy-pasted design document I was working on for my own personal benefit: There's a game called Black and White. The premise of the game is that you are a god. You can do miraculous god things for your people, or you can do miraculous god things to your people, which will make you either a benevolent god or an evil one. Also, there are other gods out and about, and you have to convert their villages either by terrifying them into obedience or converting them through your benevolence.

No one liked it. It was clumsy and hard to figure out, and managing your villagers is frustrating whenever you try to play as a good god. When they get hungry, you give them food, so they decide to start having kids. Then they need wood for new houses once all the kids grow up and need to move out, so you have to miraculously provide that as well, not to mention overseeing the actual construction. And then the newly expanded population won't have enough food, requiring you to miraculously drum up some more.

So I decided to redesign it. The beginning of that design document is listed below. If people like it, I'll finish it. If not, I'll burn your house down and steal your goats.

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Godly Resources:

Prayer Power, which comes from worshipping villagers or sacrifices. This allows you to excercise your most powerful abilities, your miracles. These include the ability to strike people dead, unleash a pack of wolves upon the unsuspecting, strike with lightning, earthquakes, volcanoes, or blizzards, temporarily bestow an animal with intelligence, lend strength to your villagers in their farms or soldiers on the battlefield, bless your people with a bountiful harvest or curse them with fallow fields, and even rain down fire from the heavens as you bring about armageddon.

Prayer Power is also steadily consumed by the presence of your godly Avatars, beings that directly carry out your divine will, and it's a significant drain as well, making it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain more than two or three of them at once. Avatars can be Heroes, Prophets, or Monsters, and each acts differently from the others.

Every action you take drains Prayer Power. Making a villager into a disciple requires prayer power in the form of sending them the feeling to become a disciple. Telling the villagers to build a new building requires spending Prayer Power to influence the village leaders into positioning the building there. And so on, and so forth. If it changes the mortal world, it requires at least a little bit of Prayer Power.

There are a number of secondary resources. Food is raised on farms, ranches, and fisheries, and is steadily consumed over time based on the population of the village (villages drain only from their own stockpile, they do not drain from the stockpiles of other villages you control). Wood is used to build things and is harvested by cutting down trees. Stone can also be used to build things (it's interchangeable with wood), takes longer to gather, but the quarries produce much more stone than a single forest. Gold is used to make shiny things for your villagers (including things that don't actually make sense as coming from gold, like silk clothes and lamp oil, because forcing the player to harvest each luxury item individually would make the game much more complicated than it needs to be). Finally, metal is used to make tools, weapons, and armor in order to make the other jobs go better, and to make your soldiers both safer and deadlier in battle.

More later. Maybe.