It's my birthday. My gift to myself is this post.

It's so hard to find the time and motivation to work on my game projects these days. This one actually has a bit of dust on it, having sat on the shelf for a couple of months now, the last time I had a big burst of motivation.

The tentative name of the game is Rise from Ruin, and it's a city-building Sim in a fantasy setting. What you see so far is very, very basic. Currently, it's all about water. Each villager requires one water to survive. If you have a surplus of water, there's a chance you'll gain an extra villager! If you don't have enough water, though, there's a chance someone will die of dehydration.

First, you choose a city center, anywhere on the map that you can see. You can move it later, if you want. You get a little bit of water for each square within city limits. See the little rock cairns on the borders between tiles? All squares inside the cairns are in city limits, considered 100% safe, defended from outside forces by all the villagers you have guarding the place - the default job for villagers who aren't doing anything else. You can instead assign villagers to go collect water from any tile. This increases your water supply, but since you have less villagers you can't protect as much turf, so you have to strike a balance. You collect more water from tiles outside the city limits than inside, but the darker a square is the greater the danger there. If you send your villager into unsafe territory, there's a chance they'll get eaten by something and or get lost.

So far, that's all there is to it. I hope the art speaks for itself well enough. I did all the art you see in GIMP. I'm trying to make this game more graphical and fancy than EverDelve. I find I actually enjoy working on the visual interface for a game, especially with animations and the like, and I never really got to do much of that with EverDelve. You can't experience it in the image, but the two job buttons you see on screen (a water drop and a small laurel wreath) swirl and blossom out from the center of whatever square you click. I love animating stuff. ^^

So there ya go! Better late than never. Hopefully I'll be more active. If not, well ... see you guys in another two months. =/