In Eternal Wanderer the kingdom is divided in 3 major area's. The poverty district, the market area and the royal district. These places can be distinguished by plenty of factors going from visual appearance of the buildings to the people that live there and their behavior.
Each of those area's have major key points in the game and hold an important part of the story. But we will delve more into that in a different blog. Today I will tell you a bit more about how you can manage the kingdom from behind the scenes. Not as the greedy and corrupted king, but the hero that will get noticed over time by the people in living in the kingdom.
Due to the greed that the king had pretty much all the richness was thrown into maintaining the appearance of his residence, his needs and whatever he desired. This resulted in people requiring to not only sell their belongings to pay the taxes but to break down their place of residence significantly until it reached a poor stage (compared to what it once was). Cursed by fate and suffering by karma the king (or rather the hero) will try to right his wrongdoings. This is done by repairing, maintaining and upgrading the places of residence in the districts.
As a player you do have quite some freedom, but not too much, since this is not a city builder game. The freedom ranges from altering appearance to re-configuring the position of the building into a more sensible manner. Of course nothing is free. The hero has to pay with labor, money and time in order to shape the kingdom back in what it once was. Every small step will reward the hero with loyalty from those that he has helped so far, reducing the costs and labor of neighboring buildings. In the end of the day everyone just wants a nice place to live in. And seeing the hero from which they don't know the history they feel obligated to at least help a little bit out.
While you progress to shape the kingdom into a better stage you will unlock several things as a player. This can vary from new options from houses to utilize (such as storage) to having people work for you. Slowly but steadily you will become a king that knows how to properly manage this part of the kingdom and the people will follow you out of faith and loyalty rather than fear and despair.
Each area has it's own overall happiness factor indicating how satisfied the average citizen is. This factor is affected quite a lot by how involved you are with your people. Would you free a slave or rather capture one? Would you pay people a salary to help out the elderly ones or would you rather have them work by their own and most likely die at an earlier age? All those things also fall into the management of the kingdom.
We are still at the very first few lines of code from the game at the concept art for the buildings, but at the very least I can share with you what we are planning on making the first stage of building look like in the poverty district. Do note that this concept art is not final, it can change over time while we are getting a more vivid image about the way we want to make certain things feel and look.
Next week will be an interesting one since I will be sharing information on another quite important system in Eternal Wanderer, until then have a great time and stay tuned!
