Colony Mode

This mode refers to the bulk of the game which is spent managing the traffic of resources throughout various planets and outposts.

Premise

In the future, new resources have been discovered which will greatly increase the productivity and quality of life for people. These resources however, are scattered throughout the galaxy. You have been given the responsibility of managing the flow of these resources.

Objective

The player's objective is to build the most efficient path between areas of resource production and consumption. Further complicating this will be obstacles that the player will have to navigate around, thus sometimes the best path will not always be the clearest.

Gameplay

The player is first presented with a grid where resources, planets, and space outposts have been randomly placed. The size of this grid will vary based on difficulty and customization settings that the player is able to choose before hand.

Each planet and outpost will have a need for a specific amount of a resource. In order to get this resource to the outpost or planet, the player must set up a gathering facility on a tile which contains the desired resource. For example, if a planet requires ore, the player must set up a mining facility on a tile which contains an asteroid. Then this ore can be moved from the mining facility to the planet by setting up a shipping pathway between them.

Furthermore, pathway "Hubs" can be set up to help direct the flow of resources. When two or more pathways are connected to the Hub, the player will be able to manually set the amount of resources that are sent in each direction. For example, if there 4 tubes connected to a Hub, one going in each direction (up, down, left and right), and the resources are coming from the up direction, the player can have 20% go left, 20% go right, and 60% go down. This will allow the player to maximize the efficiency of their resource pathways by keeping unneeded, and thus, wasted resources, from going to outpost and planets.

When the resources arrive at a planet or outpost, the player will be paid based on the amount of tiles that the resources had to travel to reach it's destination. The

The game will run in a semi-turn based fashion, where the speed of resources are measured in tiles per tick. One tick will last several seconds, making the movement very slow. From the user's perspective, the movement will look continuous, since the resources will move at the appropriate rate.

User Interface

The screen is divided into two major sections. The main area displays the map (with approximately 20x20 tiles visible). A menu bar sits on the right of the screen, approximately 2 inches wide. The menu bar contains buttons that are labeled graphically. When the user hovers over them, the name will appear over the cursor. The buttons are as follows: Build Structure, Build Line, Build Path, Place Reward, Budget, Sell, and Options. If a button is clicked, then a submenu pops out to the left of the main menu bar. This submenu contains a scrollable list of all placeable buildings within the selected category. Clicking on one of these brings up the building information in the bottom area of the main menu. With a specific building selected, the cursor is replaced by a transparent image of the building if the user mouses over the main city area. Clicking on a suitable location places that building in the colony.

When no building is selected in the submenu, the user can click on any placed structure to display its information in the bottom of the main menu. This information contains a picture of the building, and displays (with words and symbols) the build costs, operational costs, output, and units.

Scoring

Since there is no explicit victory, a player's score is essentially the happiness of the planets and outposts along with the amount of money they are generating each turn.

Under the Bonnet

This section outlines the algorithms/systems used in the colony mode. Part of the fun of this game is learning the interactions between all the game's systems and figuring out how to use them to get the kind of colony the user desires.

Time

There are two types of time: Game and Visual. Both of them are directly proportional to real time * game speed. Visual time is used to make the colony look like it is going through day and night, and should move at the speed that looks the best. Game time determines how fast the colony's denizens act. The standard unit is 1 day.

Pathfinding

This is probably one of the colony's biggest technical hurdles. If thousands of units are allowed to wander around all willy-nilly the game may come to a screeching halt. Obviously, there will need to be a sophisticated searching algorithm that the units use (like IDA*) but that will be transparent to the user.

Fortunately, the game can place some constraints on unit movement to both lessen the burden of pathing AND make the placement of transportation buidlings/paths in the game more interesting!

Paths

The obvious first constraint: units are only allowed to move on paths placed by user. There may be some exceptions for gathering and/or service units, but they would use the paths to get as close to their destination as possible before moving onto open ground. The standard path is a simple road with sidewalks. Vehicles and pedestrians can use them simultaneously.

Express Paths

Just as most real people wouldn't be willing to take side-streets for very long distances, the colony's units will only use the standard roads for a certain distance before deeming the destination "too far" and deciding to go somewhere else (like another colony that's laid-out better!). Units will use standard roads to get to Express Paths (Freeways or Tubes (like the opening scene from Futurama)) and then when they leave the express paths (at user-placed exits) they will travel up to their willingness-to-travel-on-standard-paths distance.

This helps from a programming standpoint because the game can calculate paths from each express path exit to all of the buildings within some manhattan distance and store that as a graph for units to use when calculating travel routes.

Hubs

Public transportation can also help. Units may travel to a station (bus stop, train stop, teleporter?) and then travel from another station to their final destination. Note that using a hub means they will leave their vehicles behind and their willingness-to-travel-on-standard-paths distance may be much less once they leave the hub and must walk the rest of the way.

The coding benefit from hubs is very similar to Express Paths, but may require a unit to remember where it left its vehicle and then get back in it when returning to that hub.

Development Controls

Note: These Controls are strictly for testing and debugging and are no reflection of what the controls will be in the final game.

C Key: Switch Between CONSTRUCT and CONNECT mode

Numpad 0: Select Square to be built (must be in CONSTRUCT mode to place)

Numpad 1: Select Sphere to be built (must be in CONSTRUCT mode to place)

+ and - (non-numpad): zoom the camera in and out

[ and ] : rotate the camera

; and ' : tilt the camera

The camera will scroll when the mouse cursor is moved to the edges of the screen.

When in CONNECT mode, left click and drag between two buildings to place a connection between them.

F1: Queue Tech1 for research

F2: Queue Tech2 for research

F3: Queue Tech2-1 for research, Tech2-1 cannot queued until Tech1 and Tech2 have been completed, as they are prerequisites for it

F12: Increment Research on all queued Techs, Techs take either 10 or 20 increments to complete

Spacebar: Recenter camera on build area