Hey, Paweł here!
I am happy to inform we’re starting “Dev Minutes” series of articles, which gives a little of background look into our work and tells you more about the game itself.
Time for the first behind the scenes adventure!
A few days ago I was working on states and events. You know, a nice break from other stuff. States are planned for quite a while now and the only thing now is to code them into the game. For some time we were working on the best solution and we’ve decided to go with XML (Extensible Markup Language). It helps to keep things organized and makes it pretty simple to read.
All the information within this file give a general idea to the player what various states are like. Whenever player checks the state details, the first thing he’ll notice is name and a major city in that state (disclaimer: state’s major city is not always its capital). Then we can spot other useful stuff with general information about the state itself: it’s population, state of development, urbanization level, terrain features and also forests density. All these features are important in a formula leading to MDP value. MDP (workname: Market Domination Percentage) specifies how important the state is in terms of market dominance. In other words, MDP is like a number of victory points. More victory points player has, closer to victory he is.
In summary, mentioned state details might be a good source of information, crucial to achieve market domination faster.
Another thing I’ve paid a lot of attention to recently were events. We decided to put them in XML as well, which might help us a lot. On the screenshot you can see two example events – one involves USSR collapse, the other one summer olympics in Rome in 1960. Each event has its chance to happen and the date when it can or will happen. Some events have several possible outcomes, each has defined chance to happen.
We should stop on olympics event for a minute. Olympics is the most common event type in Market Dominion. This type of events follows true Olympics locations every 4 years. The event itself gives a small booster for a state and a country it’s in. It allows companies to boost their popularity on it and it’s definitely useful during the game. Both Summer and Winter Olympics are supported to year 2020.
Oh, also, we use YAML for the descriptions. It makes it much easier to translate (and I mean easier, like REALLY). Though, I hadn’t worked on descriptions yet. Ouch.
That’s it for today, thank you for reading!
Iguana Mercenary 