Lumberbot (working title)
Here is a list of the features I plan on adding to my little “Lumberbot” game some of you may have seen. (If you follow my wife on G+ that is.)
For those of you who don’t here is a link to it: Lumberbot
Here is the link to the G+ post my wife made about it with her brief write up of how to ‘play’ with it: Lumberbot Discussion on G+
Now that that’s out of the way… Here is a list of things and notes about what I want to add to it in the order they happened to occur to me. Brace yourself, wall-o-text incoming.
- Adding a map. It needs a background grid for having randomly seeded resources that the various ‘buildings’ that generate the bottom tier of materials will require. Rich soil for a farm, rich minerals or metals for a mine, etc. I’m currently planning on using tiles the size of the farms/mines for drawing the map but having the actual underlying grid size for the buildings being at 1/4 that size. (The size of a robot basically) Individual trees would probably be the size of the smaller underlying tile which would make for 16 per farm.
- Farms would be an area on the map that is designated as such. To place a farm you would need to fully clear the area on which you want to place it and it will need to have soil. To change a crop you would need to stop planting and wait for all the plants to be harvested or there would be an option to clear the farm but doing so would make you lose all the plants you currently had growing in it. For now farm plots would all be of a fixed size but I may look at allowing larger sized plots later. Possibly as a tech upgrade of some sort.
- Haulers would behave like the bots currently do in what I have now. They would own their own tasks and you would have to edit them to change where they went and what jobs they did. Buildings could toggle on allowing drop-offs or pick-ups. There should be some way to select all the haulers that have the building as a destination on their route. There might be an upgrade to allow the haulers to know before they even go to a building if there is anything at the building for them to do. (So they can just skip it right away without having to run over to it and then on to their next node)
- A second class of ‘bot’ would consist of workers who would be assigned to buildings. It would be these bots who would say cut down trees and stack them to be hauled off and plant new ones. The production of a building would depend on the number and skill of the workers assigned to it.
- Two classes of workers would exist. ”humans” who would gain skill over time but cost more in “upkeep” (pay) as they do and “bots” who would only gain skill via an upgrade but require less upkeep per upgrade than the humans. The cost of upgrading a robot might be fairly expensive compared to just training up a human but in the long run the robot would be cheaper due to it’s lower upkeep costs.
- Haulers would also have two classes. Vehicles that would be driven by humans and automated robotic haulers. The vehicles would be cheaper to get but the combined upkeep of them with the human would be more expensive in the long run. The intent is that you would start with some vehicles and then once you could afford the automated ones you would swap the humans over to being workers and replace them. (or at least that’s my current thinking)
- There would be upgrades that you could get that would serve as multipliers to the “skill” of the workers. Better drills would mean that your mining workers would be able to mine that much better for example.
- In general, the more valuable an item or resource is the longer it will take to gather/make it.
- If the upkeep cannot be afforded then the humans may quit and leave. If a skilled human quits you will have to train up a new hire to replace them. Robots on the other hand may break down and require more money to be spent on repairing them. There might be a small chance of catastrophic failure for the robots if their maintenance isn’t done which would result in the destruction of the robot. Some upgrades might increase this chance making it more risky to miss an upkeep payment for upgraded robots.
