DevBlog 07: Tech Tree & City Building

“Greetings survivor”

We have a presence, and for now it’s sustainable. I’m fed up with just surviving, it’s time to thrive. In the dregs of the old world we find knowledge. Let’s upgrade. Consequences be damned!

Welcome to Floodland, “We can rebuild better”

We hope you’ve been enjoying our SteamNextFest Demo. Feedback so far has been great and we welcome more. Many of you have proven your survival capabilities.

But now it’s time to flourish. Floodland is not just about surviving the catastrophic “Event”, it’s about growing and improving your community on the path to building a new society. Once you’ve covered your basic needs of food, water, and shelter, it’s time to start shaping your community and we’ve given you powerful tools to help achieve this.

The tech tree is your primary method of developing the buildings and technology you’ll need. It's divided up into four main quadrants: survival, well-being, exploration, and growth. These are presented on a clock-style interface and it’s trying to balance these competing areas which will be one of your most crucial tasks.

As you progress from gaining a foothold in this new world, growing from hunter gatherer to electrical engineer, you’ll have access to basic raw materials like rubbish, wood, and rubble, which can be gathered and processed and turned into resources you require to develop your community. Eventually, you’ll progress all the way around the hours of the clock to unlock and manufacture advanced materials like coal, metal, and concrete.

These four main quadrants of the clock are also intimately interconnected with the buildings that you’ll develop to further enhance your society. The Survival arc, for example, concerns itself with harvesting basic resources like wood, food and water, which in turn will enable you to develop starter buildings like the Fishing Dock, Water Still, and Forager Hut.

Those first two are vital for securing your food supply and water sources, but the Forager Hut is useful for harvesting components of the old world, allowing you to sort through rubbish and rubble and repurpose them to fulfil your community’s needs. If you follow the survival branch all the way to its logical conclusion, you’ll be able to construct advanced buildings like the Shellfish Farming Center, Fishing Harbor, Water Treatment Plant, and Insect Farm (yum!). You’ll also unlock new building modes and advancements for your current structures.

This means the tech tree is a powerful way of measuring your progress but it also provides different choices so you can select your own path. City building is part of society building, it’s not about developing every single advance in a linear fashion but carefully choosing the ones you think will give your society the best chance of flourishing and facing your immediate challenges.

You’ll need to change and adapt your research and building strategies according to your current needs, as well as anticipating the challenges you may face in the near future. It’s about cause and effect, making trade-offs, and realising there’ll be good and bad. All of which will change with every different playthrough.

As Michał Rudziński, co-lead designer says,"Research points are limited so we force you to make choices, to specialise rather than generalise. It means there’s a consequence and weight to your decisions. You can’t have everything.”

This means you’ll have to choose wisely, survivors. A Medical Tent is probably always going to be an essential path to establishing your community, but whether you develop that before or after you construct Climbing Equipment is just