Arborlands Dev Blog – May 2021, Week #3

At the heart of Arborlands’ vision is habitat building. The player will be in charge of a troop of Arborians that want to grow a home. Sometimes the environment for this home will be indifferent, at other times, just plain hostile.

In order to build this new habitat, players will have to engage in planning and management.

So it is only natural that planning should be possible for one of the game’s fundamental features: troop movement. Your troop appears as one Arborian, and usually represents a group of individuals.

One-way routes

You can easily enough give your troop a direction to go to one place by right-clicking on traversable terrain. But what if you want the troop to follow a particular path? Maybe a straight-line path contains obstacles and is not as fast as it appears. Or maybe that path is home to dangerous animals and hazards.

Shift+Right-Click solves your problem by setting a path for the troop to follow. Here’s an early playtest:

In one-way route mode, each waypoint is removed after the troop reaches it.

Circuit Routes

Arborlands has a labor based economy, meaning that your critical decisions will often involve who is in a certain place at a certain time. Rangers will have to patrol the forests, Gatherers will gather food in one place and then move on to the next. It makes sense for these professions to have several places that they return to periodically.

For this purpose, circuit routes are very useful. Circuit routes are created by using Alt+Right-Click. Circuit routes are followed by a troop repeatedly until newer directions are given:

Later in the development, I will add the ability for the player to request that certain actions be performed on each node, whether it is gathering food, or keeping predators at bay.

Lines upon lines

After I established the route nodes, I added lines to assist in seeing the path between the waypoints:

I spent a good amount of the week trying to get a good arrow effect on the circuit lines to show the player the direction of travel. I was only partially successful, but resolved the issue in the subsequent week.

Watch the full dev vlog below to see how the waypoints are now movable, allowing the player to change their mind about the path of the routes.

This kind of programming is a blast and I was pleased to see the new feature progress steadily. I hope you enjoyed watching this feature get developed, feedback is always welcome! 😀🙏