Starting out:

Starting out, the player has an open map, with nodes of resources dotted around the map, and some crates lying around. The player unpacks these crates for a few resources to start out with. Unpacking these will also put the player immediately into build-mode, where they will have to place the storage tier 1 building to start out with. This acts as the building-tutorial.

Gather:

The player will then have to go around the map and gather available resources. These resources can be spent on building and placing new buildings.

Explore and gather whatever materials you have available to you, and use them to craft the buildings and upgrades you need. The resources you can gather are; Metal, scrap, diamond nodes and food. Food will only come from the player building a farm though.

Build:

The player starts out unpacking the crates and having to place down a storage building so the player will have somewhere to keep their resources. They will have all level 1 buildings available and can choose which buildings they want to prioritize spending resources on after placing the storage building. The buildings they choose to focus on will dictate what the player is capable of doing forward in the gameplay.

You have to build things based on the materials and resources you have available. In this world. the people can't make classic buildings using wood and such anymore, so the player has to find new and creative ways to use the resources they can find. The bus bunker is an example of using what you have available in this world.

Get the characters to research to gain new knowledge of how to upgrade buildings and build better ones. Research can be done through placing the library building. All tier 2 categories have to be researched/unlocked before the player can research any categories/upgrades on tier 3.

Survive the Extreme Weather:

Lead your colony through the challenging consequences of the extreme climate, such as tornadoes, fire tornadoes, acid rains, meteors and giant hailstorms. Keep your people fed, healthy and safe to make sure the colony survives and thrives. Build shelters/bunkers to make sure your people can hide from the dangers, and build medbays to heal up the injured.

The desolate landscape makes survival a challenge. You have to protect yourself during extreme weather that will do damage to both your people and your structures. You have to learn how to grow food from the unforgiving lands. You have to upgrade and repair buildings to survive. Heal up the people of the colony, build and repair, and research to upgrade your structures and make them able to withstand more damage from the weather conditions.

Repair:

Make sure to keep your structures repaired as they take damage from the extreme weather. If a building runs out of "health", it will be destroyed, and the player will have to use resources to build the structure again. Level up the workers by having them do tasks like scavenging, building/repairing, farming and researching. As the workers level up in their respective skill, the faster they will do their tasks. Research to unlock upgrades to your structures, so they can withstand more damage, and your repairs will be less intense to keep up with.

Natural Disasters

Natural Disasters take place on a pseudo-random schedule. The only natural disasters that will be included in the game is tornadoes and fire tornadoes. Other natural disasters we planned to implement were cut due to time constraints.
The two different types of tornadoes

Tornadoes

Tornadoes are huge manifestations of winds that can spin upwards of 300mph. Mitigating tornadoes can be difficult, so the best you can do is to assume the damage it will deal, and evacuate the population accordingly. Build bunkers to have safe evacuation spots for your colony.

• Brings piles of scrap.
• Does damage to buildings and people in its proximity.

Fire Tornadoes

When the fury of a tornado collides with the inferno of fire, a cataclysmic transformation ensues – the birth of a Fire Tornado, a relentless tempest that devours all in its path, a blazing vortex of destruction that unites the elemental forces of flame and Tornado, leaving devastation in its wake.

• Brings piles of scrap.
• Like the regular tornado, fire tornadoes do damage to buildings and people in its proximity, but the damage is higher than that of a regular tornado.

Hail

Under the effects of global warming, hail can reach incredible sizes, up to the size of a tennis balls. Hail of this size can be dangerous and will do great damage to your structures and people, especially lower-tier ones.

• Does damage to houses/buildings and people.
• Destroys scrap piles

Acid rain

Acid rain is a result of human activities polluting and disrupting the delicate balance of the environment. The chemicals released into the atmosphere become infused with raindrops, causing periodic episodes of acid rain. The toxic waters cause acidic rainfall that will do great damage to your buildings and people. Evacuate to a bunker or stay inside to avoid damage from this weather.

• Causes damage to structures.
• Destroys scrap piles

Volcano Eruption

Human climate activity is causing dormant volcanoes to become active once again! These flaming pits of doom will do major destruction to any buildings and people who are close by when the downfall hits. This is a more rare event, and will not happen as often as the other weathers. The high heat and pressure from the volcanic activity causes diamond nodes to spawn around the map after an eruption.

• Does damage to buildings and people
• Leaves behind scrap piles after it's finished
• Spawns diamond nodes after eruption.

Resources

Resources can be found in "Nodes" around the map, and it's up to the player to dispatch workers to harvest these nodes. Workers are also considered a resource, so make sure they are healthy! Resource nodes are scattered around the map in the start of the game, but after these nodes are gathered, the player will be reliant on extreme weather bringing and leaving behind more piles of scrap and metal to receive more resources.

Scrap

Piles of different pieces of scrap left over from buildings, storms, or found during scavenging and also can be made from combining food metal. Contains little pieces of metal, wood, brick, sawdust, insulation, tarp, etc. Can be used in building and/or upgrading structures.

Metal

It's a valuable resource to possess, often more precious than scrap. You can gather metal from piles of it scattered around the map in the beginning, or as residue nodes after extreme weather has hit. Metal serves as a fundamental component for construction and repairs, and occasionally, you'll also need it in the technology tree.

Food

Food stands as the utmost crucial resource for your survival. While you may come across it when scavenging for resources, the most efficient method is undoubtedly farming. The player must place down a farm to be able to reliably harvest food.

Diamonds

Diamonds are the most precious resources, often discovered through scavenging or possibly as rare treasure-nodes amidst the harshest of extreme weather conditions.

Research-Tree

The research will be accessed through the library building, which will act as a building for research and expanding knowledge. This building will consist of tree tiers; tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. The blueprint for tier 1 of this building is unlocked in the very beginning of the gameplay, when the player has unpacked the crates. Different categories can be researched within tier 2 and 3, and each category in tier 2 must be researched before any tier 3 categories are available for research. Each category of research will contain blueprints for building upgrades.

The basis of this research, is that the characters and the player have to create a new knowledge-base, since knowledge from the past is no longer relevant here. The soil is infertile, so they have to research and find out how you can manage to grow anything in these new conditions (think The martian learning to grow potatoes on mars). Same goes for buildings and upgrades - you have to learn new ways to recycle materials you find, and figure out how you can use them to your advantage.
This is what the research-tree might contain;

Tier 2:

Housing:

• House Tier 2 blueprint
• Bunker Tier 2 blueprint
• Storage building Tier 2 blueprint

Hygiene:

• Outhouse blueprint
• Medbay tier 2 blueprint
• Grave Pit blueprint

Industry:

• Farm tier 2 blueprint
• Scavenger building tier 1 blueprint
• Mining building tier 1 blueprint (?)
• Library Tier 2 blueprint

Extra:

• Forecast Building
• Fuckbarn (aka breeding farm, aka loveshack, aka daddy-maker)

Tier 3:

Housing:

• House Tier 3 blueprint
• Storage building Tier 3 blueprint

Hygiene:

• Bathroom (shower and toilet, upgrade from outhouse)
• Medbay Tier 3 blueprint
• Grave yard (grave pit upgrade) Tier 3

Industry:

• Farm Tier 3 blueprint
• Scavenger building Tier 3 blueprint
• Mining building Tier 3 blueprint
• Library Tier 3 blueprint

Extra:

• Dance floor (Helps keep people happy)

Building descriptions

Each building and all tiers will have a short descriptive text under it that the player can read to get an understanding of what the building is, what it does, how much health it has, and what the benefits of the upgraded tiers are. With this, we're aiming for the player to easily get a sense of what each building brings to the gameplay.

Tier 1:

Housing:

• House:

• This is where the people in the colony will live! Give them a place to call home and a roof over their head! Only a certain amount of people will fit in here though, so keep an eye on your population as it grows!
• Health: 300 points
• Population: 25 people

• Bunker:

IT'S A TORNADO!! HIDE!! This is your sanctuary away from home! Hide the people in your colony here to protect them from the oncoming extreme weather! Here they will avoid damage and death, as long as your building holds.

Health: 400 points

Population: 30

• Storage:

• This is where all the resources will be stored!Be it food, metal, scrap or diamonds, this is where you'll find it! Storage has limited space though, so make sure to keep building or upgrading as you scavenge more resources.
• Health: 300 points.
• Space: 100 units of each resource.

Hygiene:

• Medbay:

• This is where you can fix up your people when they get injured! Place this down to make sure your people won't die from injuries. When they get hurt, you can send them in here to heal them up again.
• Health: 300 points.
• Healing speed: 1 points per second.

Industry:

• Farm:

• This is the players main source of food! Send workers here to harvest food for the colony and advance their farming-skill. Harvested food will be stored in the storage building.
• Health: 300 points.

• Library

• This is where the player can do their research! Send characters in here to have them advance their research skill and unlock new blueprints for upgrading buildings. This tier will allow the player to research and unlock blueprints for tier 2.
• Health: 300 points.

Tier 2:

Housing:

• House:

• This is where the people in the colony will live! Give them a place to call home and a roof over their head! This upgraded house will have increased health and room for more people!
• Health: 400 points
• Population: 40 people.

• Bunker:

• IT'S A TORNADO!! HIDE!! This is your sanctuary away from home! Hide the people in your colony here to protect them from the oncoming extreme weather! Here they will avoid damage and death, as long as your building holds. This upgraded bunker has more health and can hold more people.
• Health: 550 points
• Population: 50

• Storage:

• This is where all the resources will be stored! Be it food, metal, scrap or diamonds, this is where you'll find it! This upgraded storage will have increased health and room for more resources!
• Health: 400 points.
• Space: 200 units of each resource.

Hygiene:

• Outhouse:

• This is just for decoration, if you want to decorate with it.
• Health: 300 points.

• Medbay:

• This is where the player can fix up your people when they get injured! When they get hurt, the player can send them in here to heal them up again. This upgraded medbay will have increased health and heal people faster.
• Health: 400 points.
• Healing speed: 2 points per second.

Industry:

• Farm:

• This is the players main source of food! Send workers here to harvest food for the colony and advance their farming-skill. Harvested food will be stored in the storage building. This upgraded farm has more health.
• Health: 400 points.

• Library:

• This is where the player can do their research! Send characters in here to have them advance their research skill and unlock new blueprints for upgrading buildings. This tier will allow the player to research and unlock blueprints for tier 3.
• Health: 400 points.

Extra:

• Fuckbarn (aka breeding farm, aka loveshack, aka daddy-maker)

This is where the magic happens! At least... whatever magic can happen during these rough times. Have two of your people walk in here, let the magic happen, and BAM! You have a new member of your colony!

Health: 300 health points.

Tier 3:

Housing:

• House:

• This is where the people in the colony will live! Give them a place to call home and a roof over their head! This upgraded house will have increased health and room for more people!
• Health: 500 points
• Population: 55 people.

• Bunker:

• IT'S A TORNADO!! HIDE!! This is your sanctuary away from home! Hide the people in your colony here to protect them from the oncoming extreme weather! Here they will avoid damage and death, as long as your building holds. This upgraded bunker has more health and can hold more people.
• Health: 700 points
• Population: 70

• Storage:

• This is where all the resources will be stored! Be it food, metal, scrap or diamonds, this is where you'll find it! This upgraded storage will have increased health and room for more resources!
• Health: 500 points.
• Space: 300 units of each resource.

Hygiene:

• Medbay:

• This is where the player can fix up your people when they get injured! When they get hurt, the player can send them in here to heal them up again. This upgraded medbay will have increased health and heal people even faster.
• Health: 500 points.
• Healing speed: 3 points per second.

Industry:

• Farm:

• This is the players main source of food! Send workers here to harvest food for the colony and advance their farming-skill. Harvested food will be stored in the storage building. This upgraded farm has more health.
• Health: 500 points.

• Library:

• This is where the player can do their research! Send characters in here to have them advance their research skill and unlock new blueprints for upgrading buildings.
• Health: 500 points.

Characters

The characters are the members of the colony the player cares for. They have a base health of 100 points, and can be injured by extreme weather. The characters are the player's workforce, and can be assigned to the different tasks; scavenging, building, research and farming. Workers can be re-assigned or removed from a workplace at any time. Character health is healable through the medbay building. The player then has to balance the time it takes to heal the character with taking the character away from their task.

Skills

All characters start out with all four skills in value 0. Doing the tasks related to the skill, or practicing/studying it in the library will increase the skill. All skills have 3 levels - maxing out the skill-bar on level 3 makes the character a specialist in that skill.
Farming:

This skill will be based on gathering food from any usable source, growing and harvesting food from farms, and cultivating the land. Could potentially be related to cooking later on?

Science:

This skill will be based on research. The characters will have to research resources, the weather, and general researching to discover/invent new helpful inventions, blueprints and upgrades for buildings.

Engineering (building):

This skill will be based on building (and crafting?) houses, food storage, upgrading buildings, building or tearing down constructions and protection from the extreme weather.

Scavenging:

This skill will be based on going through scrap piles for usable resources, and by sending characters outside of the map for scavenging for resources, water, food, and other people. These scavenger-missions will be a rabbit-hole type thing, where a timer pops up in the UI, counting down a certain time that indicates how long the scavenger-mission will last.

Levels

If workers work in the same workplace over an extended period of time, their levels will increase in that field, allowing them to do their work more efficiently.

Health

Workers are real humans living in your city, they need to be fed, provided healthcare and receive free-time. If you fail to take care of your workers, their satisfaction will drop, and eventually, they will form a riot (or like die, lol).

Mechanics

Following is a list of important mechanics for the game.

Movement

The movement in the game is done using keyboard WASD, you can move forward, backwards and to each side. You can also zoom, pan and rotate the camera view using Q and E on the keyboard. The camera angles will snap into place at a 45 degree angle.
The characters themselves can be moved by clicking and dragging over the characters you want to select, and then click or drag them over to the task you want them to do.

Tile System

The tile system is in charge of handling tiles and it's inhabiting buildings. The initial plan was to have a procedurally generated map that utilized this system, but that has since been scrapped due to time constraints.

Natural Disasters

Natural Disasters are a core mechanic, and something you can expect to see often.

The natural disaster section has been down-scoped heavily due to time constraints. Instead of having several types of natural disasters, like tornadoes, floods, wildfires, giant hail, acid rain, etc, we will only include the tornado as a natural disaster. We will focus on making this one disaster look and seem better rather than trying to rush into adding half-functional disasters. This was done due to down-scoping, but also because of how vital the natural disaster part is to the game concept and game play.
Tornadoes do damage to buildings and people it's in proximity to, and brings resource-piles in its aftermath. This will be the only way for the resource piles to regenerate, and the citizens/player will be dependent on natural disasters to receive more resources.

Systems

This game is heavily based on several programmed systems. These systems are important mechanics for the main functions of the game.
Unit System:

This system contains information and functionalities of the characters in the game. This system contains things like;

• Health
• Levels
• Hunger (Pending)
• Work schedule (Pending)
• Death/Birth
• Random names
• Models based on gender and profession

Building System

This system contains the functionalities and information relevant to the buildings in the game. This system contains things like;

• Placement
• Purchasing (spending resources on the buildings)
• Repairing/Destroying
• Health (how much damage the buildings can take, and health healing with repairs)
• Persistent saving/loading

Workstation System

• Work simulation on a per-unit basis
• Scaling with unit levels

Research System

This system contains information and functionality related to researching. This system includes;

• Unlocks - unlocking blueprints for upgrades of buildings
• Purchasing

Weather System

This system contains information and functionality related to all the extreme weathers. The functionality, movement and consequences of the extreme weather are in this system.

• Tornadoes
• Damage over time

Time System

This system contains the functionality of all timers and time-based operations in the gameplay.

• Tick-based, scaleable time simulation

Message System

This system contains the functionality of the messages that pop up from the characters throughout the gameplay.

• Reminders/Alerts on various in-game events

Resource Management System

This system contains the functionality and information related to the resources in the game. This system includes;

• Allocation of resources
• Spending resources
• Saving of resources
• Loading of resources

Tile System (deprecated)

This system contains the functionality and information about the different types of tiles in the game. This system contains;

• Burst-compiled mesh generation
• Cell blending using vertex colors

Rules

These are the rules of "Our Consequences" gameplay:

• The player cannot place buildings on very tall mountains
• The player cannot place buildings on top of trees, or remove trees
• Placing a building on top of any other environmental models will delete the model it's placed on (for instance; if the player places a building where a cactus or a rock is placed, the cactus/rock will be deleted)
• Trees are important, and cannot be chopped down or removed
• The player cannot place buildings on the water
• The player cannot place buildings outside of the map border
• The player has to place down a storage building before gathering any resources