Welcome to Springton!

 

Introduction

I have spent the last couple weeks working on the town for the game. The town is called Springton and features:

• A Town Hall
• Library
• High School and Gym
• University
• Restaurants
• A Theater
• A range of shops
• A central park
• Over 30 houses ranging in style and architecture

Here is a video of the new town:

Process

I made all of the buildings in Inkscape (a free vector-based art editor) this made the buildings scalable. Also, I found it generally easier to work with scalable graphics. 

Once all of the buildings had been created, exported an SVG to import into the game engine. Problem was, the file was large - even as an SVG, and required rasterizing during runtime. This made the town very slow to render.

A simple fix was to export the town as a large PNG (something like 3000px by 1500px). This rendered fine - but came with a problem. You see, there is a cap on the max sprite sheet size on every device. On PC, this cap is pretty big; on mobile, much smaller. Some devices can't render images over 2048px by 2048px, which meant the image would be a problem.

Instead, I opted for recreating the town in edit-time in engine, exporting each building as a separate sprite image. This took longer, but ensured higher compatibility to devices on export.

Another Problem

Mobile phones usually don't have their own dedicated video memory (VRAM), relying on the CPU to do the rendering. This means there is a substantial limit on the amount of images you can render without crashing a phone. 

To avoid any problems, the size of the sprite-sheets needed to be reduced, which is done by making the art smaller.

Building Interaction

The bulk of user interaction is going to be with the buildings, other peeps, or objects in their inventory. Because of this, building interaction needed to be developed. I am still in the early stages of adding interactions, but applying for jobs and joining what is known as "activities" has been added already.

Activities are a way to increase skills through a monthly membership model. These can be things like a gym membership or joining the Springton book club. Some of these are visible in the video above.

Careers

I have now also fully implemented all the careers that will be in the game on launch. There are 12 careers with 10 promotional levels each. Different careers  will require different skills to increase performance.

Potential Renaming of the Game

Recently I've also been thinking about changing the name of the game. Pocket Life might then become the subtitle, as I think it's too generic as the name itself. If this happens, I'll keep the blog under the same URL, but the main website will change (as well as updating the look, as it's long overdue).

Conclusion

Thanks for all of the support for the game so far! My next blog will be on procedural item generation (as that's something else I've been doing over the last two weeks).