It’s been a while since the last update and there’s a reason why!
DoN has been redesigned from ground-up to be an RTS-Third-Person-Action hybrid now. While play-testing the previous incarnation of the game it was clear that this was an RTS game at heart and the third-person action was in some ways holding back the potential for strategy and management. Add in the “Living Flora simulation” which aims to model flowering, reproduction, seed dispersal and decay of plants and the RTS roots were a no-brainer at this point. Third-Person will still play a big role, especially in combat and/or exploration but I’m walking a tightrope with RTS v/s TPP and I’ll have to work out the balance over time.
It took around a month to cook up an RTS mode with an acceptable framework for delegating mouse actions to strategy actors and to support unit actions like breeding, resource harvesting, storage of seeds, planting of seeds from HUD, etc. Now I can finally take a break from coding and start creating art assets again, really looking forward to that! There’s a ton of things in the map for which I’ve used embarrassing looking spheres, cylinders and cones to prototype stuff.
For those interested in the nature simulation - RTS actions like breeding are proving tricky to normalize across different pollinator species. Eg: Honey bees are colony insects that have a single bee hive per colony (unlike the solitary bee species) while for butterflies it’s individual queens that lay eggs on host plants (eg: milkweed plants commonly associated with the famous Monarch butterflies). What’s more, these eggs actually need to metamorphose into caterpillars and beyond as well, so there’s a completely unit lifecylce to model- IF I’m feeling brave enough to widen the scope of DoN further that is!