I decided to go the the "History Repeats Itself" theme

 I've been watching a lot of history programs recently, so my ideas naturally fell from that. My game will be about the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete over 3000 years ago. Their capitol of Knossos is believed to be the inspiration for Atlantis (as well as many other myths and legends), as it was a large city that was lost beneath the sea when it was hit by a huge wave originating from a volcanic eruption on Santorini, and basically spelled the end for the Minoans.

The way I tie this into the game is that you must spread the Minoan culture and people as much as you can before the disaster. You spread culture by creating new settlements, to acquire new resources, and establishing trade. When the disaster happens it can wipe out a number of your cities and ships. If you're culture of not strong enough after this event, you lose, if it is still strong enough you carry on until the next disaster. So your mission is to help the Minoans avoid their fall in the face of repeated apocalyptic events.

Inspirations for the gameplay include: Civ V & Grand Ages

Day 1:

Started with a tileset, as I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull of anything I'd like with the given pallette, but I'm suprised (I think it turned out well):

I'm using JS/HTML5. The world map is loaded from an image and tiles are placed based on it. I got auto-tiling working for the land, but I'll show pics of that tomorrow when I've got more on it. :)

it looks great!!! nice artwork you got there! 

Day 2:

Made a lot of progress on defining and creating the map. The map itself is a BMP with the land, sea, forests and mountains drawn on it as pixels. It is read in and the tiles are placed according to the pixel colors. It also has special colored pixels that represent settlements. These settlement pixels are referenced in the game by their color to match them up with the settlement names and types, etc.

I also created some more graphics, including water animation, ships and a font.

As it's rather easy to create the map, I plan to have it quite large with a lot of settlements on it. I love exploration in games like this so I want a big area to do it in, but have enough in it that you may not see it all in one play through. As survival is about the locations' geography, as well as your economy, it should lead you to experiment in finding the safest locations which also have the highest potential for further trade.

The realistic limit for the map size in real terms will probably by from Sicily in the west to Jerusalem in the east, and from Egypt in the south to Byzantium in the north. I think this will give the best trade off in terms of historical accuracy vs. being interesting as a game.

More about the game:

Culture: The goal of the game is to increase your culture through trade and settlement. All settlements will be placed from the start, but may have no existing culture, allowing you to "settle", giving you a cultural affinity there. Other settlements may not be settled if they have an existing cultural affinity, such as "Mycenaean" or "Egyptian", but you can still increase your culture to be the majority one (though never replace the affinity). Cultural affinity provides  a constant increase to that culture, so if you stop trade, it'll gradually revert to the affinity culture.

Doom: Disasters will be periodic events that will appear at random locations and could potentially destroy your culture. To survive these events you must have enough culture in cities that survive the event to continue spreading culture. If you don't, the Minoans will die out.

Trade: Trade is a matter of assigning routes between cities. Say Knossos > Athens for example, that route will link those cities resources together, possibly allowing new resources to be created and traded. The trade resources that provide the most culture will be the hardest to create, requiring the most base resources. You'll be able to view what is being created or what new resources you need, but it is otherwise automatic, you just set up the routes you need. You can manage trade from any city in which your culture is the majority. Also, the longer the distance of the trade route, the less culture it will generate in target cities (but it will have no negative effect on resource acquisition).

There's still a lot to figure out, but I don't believe it's so much that I'll run out of time, lol. It's not really the kind of game I've made before. But it's the kind I play, so hopefully it all works out! :)

Day 3:

Expanded the map a bit, and added a lot more settlements (currently at 27). The map now reaches down the north Africa, esp Egypt, the Nile delta looks pretty cool and will be navigable via ship. I've also started work on the culture system and tying it into the UI. I started on the mini-map. And I've added colored city labels + stars to indicate which culture is prevalent (culture determines control, so it's basically a faction display):

Imports and Exports here is just a mockup. There will likely be more and may have to be abbreviated on this screen, with more detail being provided by a larger panel. Imports shows you what resources are being provided by trade routes "upstream". Exports shows the resources that you are sending "downstream". Note, you can't export your imports. Imports and Exports combined are all the resources available to create higher tier resources. So the concept here is that a city with a lot of trade routes can produce the highest quality goods and have to most cultural impact, but having such a "hub" potentially puts you at risk of losing a lot come the next disaster. Classic "putting all your eggs in one basket" problem.

EDIT:

I actually just quickly traced out the rest of the map, so all the land and water is there albiet un-detailed, Worth keeping in mind that you won't see most of the inland, only the coasts. And I'm also considering adding "deep water" to limit access to the large open water spaces and force you to go through safer shallow waters, this is more realistic and should alleviate boredom that'd come from such empty vastness. It should be fun to discover the far off lands though! :)

Day 4:

Sadly I wasn't able to get much done today as my parents came over for dinner, prior to that there was a bunch of house cleaning. So I wasn't able to get functioning game-play in as I had hoped. I did however complete the code for UI buttons so I can add callbacks to them now. I also added the "deep water" feature I mentioned yesterday and added several more cities:

You can see from the minimap (which is in the wrong location, lol), that the deep water isn't currently drawing the correct color, but it shows how more secluded it can make some places, as seen with Malta there.

Day 5:

I fixed the mini-map so that now fully works, and reveals with the fog of war. And I got the trade routes and settlement working in it's most basic form. There's no actual resource or culture transfer yet, but it does join 2 settlements and has a visual ship travelling between them (still lacking path-finding, mind):

The trade route will be able to travel over land as well, to reach the cities. In this case it will change the sprite to a walking unit.

There's a lot of information to get across regarding resources, what each city has and/or where they're coming from and what is needed to produce certain other resources. So to avoid any more menus (I'd like to NOT have nested menus/panels) I'm going to create tooltips. They'll be the same style as the buttons but cyan. And it will be possible to have tooltips inside tooltips (they'd appear side by side).

Day 6:

Today was spent figuring out the economy system (resources, trading, production, etc). I think I done it in the best way I could given the time we have for this jam. I created a list with all the objects, and if they're "craft-able" they have a list of ingredients, within the game each city goes through this list and checks if it has those resources locally or imported or produced, if so then that resource gets added to production and exported. This resource list is a simple JS Object literal, so I can add loads of resources and create complex production chains pretty easily. The biggest issue will be will balancing the resources over the map, working out what's best for each city (or at least region).

Another challenge is going to be how to place limits on routes so you can't just spam out for all the resources. My current thought is that you can only have 1 route FROM a given city. So to get resources into a "hub", you have to send them from the other cities. This forces you to expand and set up routes in a chain fashion. That hub city will then be producing the best stuff it can, and so a trade route FROM here will have a large cultural impact.

Here's setting up a small economy during testing:

I'm going to show a bit of code for a change as well. This particular piece works really well, but I have a hate for it's complexity/odd flow. But this is what tends to be resorted to in a jam where you may be in a rush :P

It's the "newResource" aspect that I don't like but couldn't think of a more elegant solution at the time. Basically, what it does is if you start to produce a new item, go through the list of craft-able items again. This is so that the item you produced can be used as an ingredient in production of another item.  For example, if the city is making bronze, it stands to reason they'd use it to make tools. I try to avoid "IF-ageddon", seems I failed here! :P

I missed a couple days so I'll fill them in albeit a little brief.

Day 7:

This day I decided to tackle the title screen. I knew I wanted a ship to be forefront and after Googling around for a while to find a base image, I found an artists impression, for National Geographic, of the volcanic eruption of Thera (Santorini) and the Minoan evacuation. It was perfect and relevant! All I had to do now was take this image and make it into the 4 colors, THIS was no easy task. After playing around with direct conversion it was clear it wasn't going to work. I ended up cutting out the individual elements of the image (sea, sky, volcanic plume, ship, etc) and coloring them individually, all of it other than the ship was basically re-draw anyway:

I also spent time working on path-finding. It's not-quite A* but I plan to add that given time at the end, not for it's slight speed advantage, it's only a minor change, but to allow it to favour diagonal routes. As atm it prefers taking one big right-angle. The distance wouldn't change, just make routes more zig-zaggy and SEEM more direct.

Path finding allows roads now, between inland cities and port towns, the fog of war will clear all along the road when any part of the road is discovered. Path-finding allows the coast to be blocked except at ports, and allows deep water to be blocked.

Day 8:

This day I worked on the trading system, turning local resources and imports into exported resources. The higher tier resources produce more culture in the cities they are sent to. Gain enough culture in a city and you can start controlling it's trade like it's your own city. It is visible displayed as your city, but your cultural influence there will drop if you cease trading, and revert to the city's affinity culture.

Day 9:

And today I finally implemented the disasters. These are a key aspect to the game, they are the thing you have to survive against. There will be different kinds of disaster, but I think this'll be the most prominent as well as the most destructive. This is a volcano, this can erupt both inland and sea the sea, if near the sea however, it will trigger a tsunami which will spread through the sea, destroying port towns in it's wake.

Cities take damage. This will put them out of action for a while, preventing a quick re-population. Cities will not lose their cultural affinity (if of a culture other than Minoan), so even when they recover you will not be able to trade with them until the native population (culture) has recovered to a certain point.

Day 10:

Starting on the polish, fixing and rounding off sharp corners. There's still plenty to do in regards to the economy system, so I've been adding new raw and product resources. And assigning these new resource to places around the map. I'm not sure I'll have to time to add UI that explains some of the things I would like it to, but I will write up a manual/doc. I drew some more of the map and created several new cities.

I wanted to Tweet this image but I think it's too large to upload directly, lol. But this is the whole map as rendered in game:

Also, tomorrow I should be implementing sound and music, created by https://isaacsjohnson.itch.io/ who I worked together with on my last jam entry, Orchard.