I finally got some good developments in creating the little towns that exist in the world of “True King.” This was kind-of done earlier, but I made some improvements (I think) to how it looks, and also to how the towns are used via the game context.

Comparison to update of town visuals in “True King”

The above image shows the difference, some of which are pretty stark. I did have placeholder houses for the first town in the game, but they were far too big (more noticeable when the player or an NPC was next to it), and no effort was made on the texturing. Personally, I think the houses NOW are a bit too small, but after testing, they are the best size compared to the player.

These towns were the part of the world I was most concerned by. I am not particularly good at environment design (I much prefer character design), and I wanted the towns to vaguely resemble simple towns you might see in some other RPG. I spent a lot of time on creating a generic look to the houses that I could alter for each town, and experimenting with different colors and textures. But after placing them, something still seemed to be missing, and it didn’t feel much of an improvement to the previous ugly houses.

Town with just houses.

And then I started adding miscellaneous objects to dress the town up a bit.

Town with houses and other junk.

I was surprised by the difference. This entire time, the towns didn’t look right because they were too EMPTY! A few little details thrown around helped a lot, and I suspect adding a few NPC’s will make it even better. I don’t know yet that this is what the final town will look like, but I’ll go with it. This is the first time I felt remotely satisfied with how the towns would look.

Below are a few more screenshots of some different houses that represent other towns.

Part of another town.

Part of yet another town.

Simply making up houses, their textures, and a list of miscellaneous objects that I didn’t spend more than 10 minutes each to make, wasn’t the biggest accomplishment I made this month. You see, the gameplay will involve you walking from town to town and liberating them from the current king, gaining the townspeople as part of your own growing little army. The individual people are distinct, and their collective opinion decides whether or not they would follow you as the “True King.” And should you die along the way, the world moves forward one generation as you reappear, updating the population of each town, as well as the number and state of houses based on said population. Wow… I haven’t explained that much of the game before, I think.

So much of the game’s state depends on randomly generated properties, and the towns are meant to be random to some extent. A lot of my progress has not only been in modeling the houses, but making sure their size, local 3D position and scale matched with each other, such that I could easily swap out one for the other. Look below for a screenshot of the different house types.

Houses from each town.

And each town now exists as a set of pre-defined house placements and rotations, with each placement defined by a generic cube, with the red face representing the front of the house. See below.

Town before running the game.

Each time the game is run, it searches for a save file that defines the town (else, it randomly generates a default one). The total number of houses that actually appear in each town depends on the number of people that exist in the town, variable over multiple generations. Simply creating the format of the file and being able to instantiate each town like that is a big step for me!

And this also means I can move forward a bit. I may still add a little bit to the first town, including a few major landmark buildings that remain constants. But I won’t spend the next few months worrying about the details of the entire world, just the first 1/4 of it. Before getting carried away, I need to add some NPCs, then the first few minutes of contact in the gameplay, and get the turn-based strategy battles working. That would give me a demo that I can continue to build off of.