Outcast Mayor

Outcast Mayor (Personal, 2021-)

A personal Project that of mine, that explores a combination of survival crafting and village-building. (Unity 2022, C#)

I started this project as a way to work on a few mechanics and tech-things, that I found interesting, as well as an outlet to investigate a sort of "dream game"-idea that I had in my mind. The concept is simple: It combines the survival, crafting & creative building of Valheim, with village-/community-building gameplay like Stonehearth or Going Medieval. All wrapped into a story about discrimination and found family.
Obviously the plan was always to only make a prototype and play around with mechanics etc. I wrote all of the code and I also modeled the characters and eventually the modular buildings parts in Blender. The other models are from kenney.nl or the unity asset store.

Key Tasks:
- Utility AI
- gridless, part-based Building Mechanic
- Fluffy, stylized Tree shader
- Character Modeling & Rigging + Blendshapes

Building

The building mechanic combines various aspects from games that I like. The cornerpoints were: Allows for creative expression & works with AI builders. The free placement is inspired by valheim, no grid to be found here. There is a "blueprint system", as is prevalent in village building games, but also in grounded. That was necessary for the villagers to later help with the construction. It also includes some features like recognizing "complete rooms", which was meant to inspire building "proper" houses.

Villager AI

The AI system was the second large system I implemented for the project. I wanted to have something that is based on needs and priorities, rather than fixed trees to accommodate for the complexities of a game like this. I have some experience with GOAP, which is also a good fit here. But I tried Utility AI instead. After reading a lot of papers and fussing about my codestructure a lot I managed to get it up and running. Utility AI isn't very good at logistics or "task chains", so getting the characters to do those was a bit round about. But it works and it's very flexible.

Fluffy Trees

The last system I spent some time on was making a fluffy, stylized tree shader and tool. I used inspiration from various videos on youtube as well as a showcase by the devs of botany manor, to make a "turn everything into a tree" tool and shader. The look didn't end up the way I envisioned it for the project, but it was some fun programming nonetheless.

Contact

If you have any questions or want to get in contact with me, please write me an Email to viezensj@googlemail.com