Some time ago I started to build a little medieval village building simulation. I thought it might be time to share it and collect a bit feedback. It’s carefully said still some way to go for a real game and the Demo here does not allow full interaction but maybe someone still wants to have a look.
Demo: The little BuiltIt-Game
It’s basically about building settlements, growing them, trading resources, build up influence …
Feedback is welcome!
Love the civ3 style!!
I’d say it goes a bit more Anno Style but idea is to be more free in arrangement mod buildings, building extensions and decorations and want to go away from fixed buildings to more dynamic structures to fill gams in cities and build more organic structures. I’m absolutely curious how to utilize the procedural geometry of babylonjs7 for more dynamic landscapes. For now I need to fix some things to handle economy in larger settlements and player interaction.
Here a larger settlement example - the current demo “Capital”
May I ask, is the city layout generated or did you hand-place the buildings?
I have no idea what I should be doing there. So I just camera-moved around and looked at the scenery.
I already like the game world. It is nice to look at! I also stalked some of the villagers. Anyway, looking forward to seeing a lively town 
Loading time is too high. I did not measure it but it approached, if not exceeded, the 1min mark.
The wind animation of the trees is hardly noticable. I would ramp that up. Also, it seems that the animation does not loop around properly. There is a gap of maybe 500ms between loops.
There was a guy running around with a box in his hands. Whenever I clicked him there was a short but noticeable lag. In fact, just noticed, whatever I clicked (houses too), lag. By lag I mean the walking animation of the box guy or smoke particles froze for like 300ms.
This might be purely a matter of taste. And I do not even know why but somehow the UI overlays/icons (the ones over the 3d scene) look out of place. Maybe the colors? Too colorful? The icons look good in the 2d menus.
Thanks, this is what I’m looking for. Very valuable feedback, thanks. Currently It’s only for looking around, a version with more interaction will follow - hopefully soon.
The cities are created while testing the gameplay, not generated - I mean, it’s the idea of the game to build settlements - but need to admit, the demo client does not allow this for now, but may come soon.
Regarding loading times, it has quite some room for improvement. Think I did not use the smartest approach to generate the environment with trees and for the adjustment of the ground textures. I’ll improve that!
One little thing, since you mentioned there is not that much to do - you clicked on the villagers, so I activated a first draft of the villager interaction. Now you would at least get a short feedback and in some cases insights into the villages issues. This is meant to allow some small kind of missions for solving problems.
Did some smaller adjustments in the meantime. Means it is now possible to play a little Demo Session. There are still a few usability issues and maybe not everything is fully intuitive yet but you can have a look and try around.
Visiting
let’s you create a demo player, valid for a few weeks. Try, and if you want there is a feedback option to help me improving the game.
Looking good!
I lost my ground terrain (disappeared) spam clicking the trans_meat buttons top right to follow villagers.
Ahh, yes, thanks for the hint - happens due to a memory issue I need to resolve, happens especially on mobile devices - a way to avoid it or at least to reduce the occurrence is to switch of particles and/or shadows in the config. Just reload the page and your game should continue …
BTW - best performance and stability seems to be on Chromium based Browsers.
Since there were one or two hints that the scenes still looks a bit static, due to the fact that the animations of trees are almost not visible, I started to play around with Shader Materials.
Looks cool 
As some ideas, I think adding birds flying around, some leaves falling and some clouds moving across the sky will really make this come alive!
Seconded. I see some smoke in the background there,.. I added some smoke and fires to buildings in a top-down project of mine (hooked onto an empty mesh from blender) and they really enlivened the scene.
Good Point, didn’t think about birds. Will put it on the list. Thanks
One more video from the demo, still no birds, but maybe a better impression showing the current state. From here I think I need to focus a bit more on gameplay and maybe slightly more on usability before jumping into more visual details.
I think it’s time for a little update. In the meantime I did some adjustments regarding usability and stability. I worked a bit on the current main region for the demo, so it looks a bit more interesting and hopefully brings a bit more fun while playing it.
To get a better feeling what works already I created a short walkthrough video, think will be a series to show the development over time. This one describes the first steps when playing the demo.
Next on the list is experimenting with areas of buildings and more people and dynamics. I curious if I can manage to display larger amounts of nicely animated villagers (think I saw some nice examples here) with slightly smarter behavior than now.
