Ok, here goes.

There's some changes coming ahead on the horizon.  But first, I need to get through the rest of the month.  That includes Ludum Dare 48, which is happening in just two weeks !?!? ohcrap.

Last LD I had inklings of using chill music in our game since I was interested in that sort of thing.  That totally didn't happen, haha.  This LD I am once again having the goal of "trying not to try too hard".  I haven't really succeeded in this goal very much in the past, so let's give it another go and try to bite off less than usual this time.  It of course is always a difficult struggle, as there's no point in making "yet another generic platformer", but at the same time a lot of interesting ideas involve lots of assets (work...), creative design (hard...), or try to tell a story (hard AND work...).  Perhaps the key here is to work on something that from the get-go doesn't try to take itself very seriously.  To just build stuff without caring if it even makes that much cohesive sense.  We'll see, I guess.

 

I've been playing more Pharaoh/Cleopatra and interestingly enough, I've found it to be less satisfying than Caesar 3 so far, though it does seem to be picking up a little bit.  Part of this is because Caesar 3 spoiled me a bit by having the open-source Julius/Augustus port, but a big part of this is actually due to how the objectives and missions in Pharaoh are structured.  Many of the missions in Pharaoh involve building one or more monuments as part of the objectives (a pyramid, an obelisk, a bigger pyramid, a big tomb, an even bigger pyramid, the sphinx, etc) and I think this is one of the "cooler" parts of the game, seeing the construction of the monument take place and watching the workers haul the stones and set them in place and everything.

The problem is that gameplay-wise, building monuments is......pretty boring.  The building of the monument isn't really tied to the rest of your city, meaning the optimal strategy is just to get your city stabilized and running with a steady cashflow and worker count, and then work on the monument after that.  But at that point, there's not really any challenge anymore -- it's just a matter of getting all of the resources and then watching as the workers take a long time to build the darn thing.  And it takes a looooooong time for some of these monuments -- time when you essentially just max out the gamespeed and don't really do anything.

The real interesting part of these city-building games is trying to evolve stable housing blocks with increasing numbers of different needs, while at the same time managing exports for income, fulfilling requests for goods, and (sometimes) defending your city against invasions.  All of this is a pretty active process -- achieving all of these goals requires you to build new buildings, new housing blocks, new roads, etc.  And elevating your housing blocks more and more is really the fun part of the game, especially since each map (or at least, the well-designed maps) restricts you in some way -- maybe there's not much farmland.  Maybe you need to import many natural resources.  Maybe there's a bunch of mountains everywhere.

Now, there are a few other goals which can suffer from the same sort of "just wait until you hit them" problem.  The "Kingdom"/"Favor" rating, for example, is primarily raised by either giving money to the empire/caesar, or by successfully fulfilling requests for goods, which come every once in a while.  So if that's the only rating you're missing out on, and you have a stable city, you just fast-forward the game until you get some requests to fulfill and you win.  boooring.  But at least this rating does have some consequence in that if your favor drops TOO low (you couldn't fulfill requests, you went into debt), pharaoh/caesar will come to conquer your city for being incompetent.

The "culture" rating is a little similar too in that it's best to work on it after everything else is done -- you can just spam entertainment and education/culture buildings throughout your city at the end to hit this rating.  But you have to have enough workers to support that in the first place, and at the very least, you still have to put active work into laying out these buildings.  And it doesn't take forever.

The monuments, on the other hand, they take forever and a lot of it is just idle time.  Yes, there are ways to try and optimize build speed (make sure you have all of the resources lined up, build enough work camps, etc), but in terms of gameplay this has consistently been the least-interesting goal to achieve and takes a disproportionate amount of time to achieve it.

Thankfully I seem to be past the great pyramid-building missions so it seems that the focus will (?) maybe be a little higher on housing block evolution from now on, but we'll see.

In other (probably more relevant to you) news, I am starting to try reducing my meat consumption by taking vegetarian/flexitarian/pescetarian meals at lunch.  I've always wanted to reduce my dependence on needing to have meat as a part of every meal for practical reasons (meat often spoils more quickly than most produce, it's annoying to have to include cooked protein as part of every meal), though of course it has environmental benefits as well.  So I'm trying to start things of gradually by trying to cut out meat from my lunchtime (though I'm ok with being flexible if for example there's some protein that needs to be used before it goes bad).

Turns out that being vegetarian/vegan also sort of means learning a new type of cuisine as a lot of my meals tend to center around meat, so I'm looking forward to picking up some new culinary experience along the way.