(Re) Building the Town

Lately I have spent a lot of time working in blueprint mode to create the town that the game will take place in. The “starter town” as its being referred to is a temporary town that will be used in these earlier versions of the game. Eventually, the ability to randomly generate a town as well as share and create your own town designs will also be added to the game. But for now, to keep my sanity in check, I’m starting with a single map layout.

The Old Town

The first town that I created was a rough one. There was a lot of work just getting the town editor to function, so the general routine became place a few tiles then do some coding work to add tools that I could use to continue to build the town. I was able to build a road tool, sidewalk placement tools, foliage tools and more. These were all used to construct both the old and the new version of the town, and will also be available for players to use to create their own towns. But as a result of this mix of town building and tool building, the first town was pretty bare bones.

The old town featured four residential houses, four commercial buildings, and two civic buildings (schools) as well as a large double wide road that ran straight through town with a small parking lot attached. It allowed me to do some basic testing of the buildings and NPC routing, but it was visually very ugly and the layout was confusing.

The New Town

The new town is significantly improved in many ways. The first is that it is much larger, about 4 times the size of the original town. This gives players more room to walk around and NPCs more room to exist as well. I attempted to construct the layout of the town based on a more European style build. This is because European cities tend to be walkable and pedestrian orientated, which is the same vibe I wanted for Past Connections. Despite there being some cars, these are primarily for aesthetic and world building reasons. Players will unfortunately not be able to drive a car, likely at any point in the game. The entire game is about being in a community and building connections, and cars can create isolation and pull you away from it. When you drive to the bakery, nobody is going to stop you to say hello, but when you walk you might bump into an old acquaintance or a friend that wants a quick chat. The new town was designed with this in mind, so there is a market square close to the neighborhood that is intersected by public service buildings such as a hospital and school.

A really exciting part of Past Connections is that every building is going to be enterable. This might mean less total buildings, but a higher quality of the existing buildings. I absolutely hate empty placeholder buildings in games, I would rather create a smaller, more tightly knit town that lets you explore every crevasse, than having a large open town that is mostly empty.

The development of the AI NPC systems has also been going very well. Now that the town is constructed I’ve been working on adding interviews for jobs and connection possibilities while you work a job and I am really excited to see where it goes.

If you want to stay up to date with Past Connections and its development make sure to join the waitlist. The waitlist list is also where I will be drawing emails to playtest, so if you want the soonest possible access then now is the time to sign up!