This version 0.2 is more of a progress report / development build and not balanced or polished. Just to show what I got done in a bit over twice the game jam time. My original idea was somewhat out of scope but this 0.2 version is roughly my original idea. Plus some optional stuff, minus issues still present. Many things like audio and settings are still missing, other things are more important to figure out how to do and to see if the gameplay works.

Originally I wanted citizens that transport items, work at buildings and that fulfil their needs like sleep and eat but there was no time during the game jam. The 10 day voting period meant that we can't upload any new files, so I wanted to use that time and date as kind of a soft deadline to get something closer to my original idea with citizens done.

I got citizens done and it was way more complicated than I thought. Quite a complex task management system with buildings that have demands and offers and tasks that get created by matching a demand and an offer and potentially splitting it into multiple tasks to limit how much one citizen carries and then those getting assigned to idle citizens...

I also reworked the inventory and item system to use item types in a dynamic list instead of the four hard coded ones. So some very important ground work. Unity is quite limited in what kind of data it can show in the Inspector unless you extend it. I found the "Serialized Dictionary" to display C# Dictionaries which is a great help: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/p/serialized-dictionary-243052

The amount of code quite precisely doubled. From 1750 lines in the game jam version to 3470 now and that is with a bunch of refactoring, unifying and cleanup.

Changelog

• Added citizens that get auto assigned to buildings to work there and that transport items around. (You can invite Citizens at warehouses.)
• Changed resource system from a global one to a local one. Every building and citizen has an inventory now and items have to be moved around by citizens instead of them getting added and taken from a magical global storage.
• Replaced the farm building and gave it actual growing wheat.
• Added a warehouse building as a general storage (it's currently the former farm model)
• The terrain around buildings is now changed to a dirt material and grass is removed.
• Reworked terrain generation to create clear flat terrain and more natural looking lakes and mountains. (Support for building on uneven terrain maybe later, it needs flattening, terraforming and such.)
• Replaced the rectangular building selection marker with an emission color based marking.
• Added a notification system to alert of bandit attacks, citizens not finding food, citizens dying, buildings getting destroyed, bandits stealing items, and so on.
• Added a stats menu to show what citizens are doing and what demands and offers buildings have. The later is maybe more of a debug feature and might be removed later.
• Optimized the tree handling. Previously I just used a big list of normal objects (with LOD groups) because that was better than the normal terrain based handling which handled adding, removing and growing trees terribly slow. Now it's a chunk, LOD, frustum and DrawMeshInstanced based approach which should be a lot faster.
• Updated credits.
• Many small things and various optimizations.

There are still a lot of things to do and many issues. I have over 80 open ones written down plus vague long term ideas. I guess I just continue working until I have a more solid and polished base and then ask playtesters what they think. I'm also thinking of changing the name, I keep forgetting it and it was chosen to be quite descriptive and hinting towards the game jam theme.

Currently there also seem to be a bunch of performance issues. Both low FPS in general and lag spikes.

A Semi Big Upcoming Change

This is (probably) the last version that uses fully free assets. I bought some things on sale on the Unity store... I hope they work and improve the graphics a lot.

Currently the free stuff used is:

• Terrain made with MapMagic 2 (only the free base module. I wrote the tree/forest spawning myself)   https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/p/mapmagic-2-165180 
• Sand texture from AmbientCG (free under CC0): https://ambientcg.com/view?id=Ground055S 
• Citizens from Sunbox Games (free): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/p/stylized-customizable-avatars-free-23039... 
• Bandit model and clothes from MPFB (free): https://static.makehumancommunity.org/mpfb.html 
• Animated with Mixamo (free): https://www.mixamo.com/ 
• Bow and arrow from Osmanov (free): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/p/free-pack-of-medieval-weapons-136607 
• Water shader from IgniteCoders (free): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/water/simple-water-s... 
• Windmill from Pxltiger (free): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy-landscape-103573 
• Farm model based on this from 3DShapes (free): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/modular-medieval-village-m... 
• Other buildings and the tree model are from the Unity demos (free): Viking Village URP and Unity Terrain - URP Demo Scene
• Wheat based on this model (free) from Graphetta and then modified and baked into billboards in Blender: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/realistic-wheat-50270968690441d3ad9d2a8924c7338b 
• Inventory and items internally done with help by "Serialized Dictionary" (free) from "ayellowpaper": https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/serialized-dictionary-2430...