Things I worked on

• Design document and planning, what do I need for the study? How should the game look and work?

• Designing and planning the tech trees, balancing them while having them distinct

• Coding the game in Unity with C#

• Making the UI for the game. Worked on making everything readable and clear.

• Organizing playtests and adapting the game after feedback

• Making all of the pixel art, and some very simple animations for the watermill and expeditions.

Adjacency bonuses and flavor

When I started working on the game I knew I wanted some form of adjacency bonuses. Depending on where you place buildings they could give different bonuses or penalties based other nearby buildings and features. I didn't really know why I felt like it was needed though, mostly that most strategy/city building games had it and it made sense. 

During development, when I was trying to figure how I wanted to do adjacency bonuses I realized why they are important. They add flavor and theme to your city, by dividing it in regions and making parts distinct. If every part has the same buildings then it becomes boring, but if a smithy needs to be put next to a mine, then players are rewarded for specializing districts. Players could always make a industrial district with mines and smithies, but by adding adjacency bonuses you reward them for it.

Furthermore by not directly stating "this is or could be a good industrial region" I let players plan out their own city and build districts how they want to. Before this I had already implemented fisheries and farm buildings that require coast and river plots respectively. They create regions in a sense, but those regions are predefined by the map layout, and not the players choices.

Randomness and Terrain

One of the first design decisions I made was regarding the terrain.  I compared other strategy and City Building games, did I want it grid or hex-based, or use a free placement similar to Cities Skylines?

I decided on neither of them. Looking at it, grids and hexes are great for random generation and turn based movement. But that is two things I had decided not to have in the game. Similarly free placement seemed like it would be harder to code and balance. Free placement generally works of a road system, which I didn't implement. Road placement and traffic are common mechanics in city building games and you know, cities overall. Making a system for placing down roads that was interesting and fun was something that I tried for a bit but gave up on. 

Overall I like the "plot" system as I call it. It works, and was easy to code and implement. It did however remove a common source of uncertainty in games like this, the random terrain generation. This meant that the game only has three possible sources of uncertainty, random technology, barbarians and the expedition mechanic  Since the random technology is a choice and only on for half the games for the study. and the expeditions is something players don't have to interact with, this means you could play the game without them.  With only barbarians the game loses a lot of its uncertainty  and replayability

Still for the time I had on the project I think not trying to implement terrain generation was a good decision, the prototype would probably be not have been completed in time if I tried. Its better to have a finished small game than a larger game stuck as a prototype. If I had done the project with more time or a team, I would have loved to try to make a terrain generation system with either a grid or hexes. Having that would have added another source of uncertainty and replayability. Alternatively I could look into other ways of adding randomness, like variation in what technologies and resources pop up.