a new idea: day 1
day one. get the core scaffolding in: a procedurally-treed map, a grid-based building placer, the first three placeable buildings (house, woodcutter, stockpile), a movable camera with zoom, villagers with basic AI, and the first food source (orchards) with a hunger need.
Broken Colony
the first colony breathes
day one of getting the colony actually living on screen. went from an empty editor to a little world with trees, villagers, homes, and by the end of the night a food economy that runs entirely on its own.
laying down the world
a map, a clearing in the middle to settle in, and the first three building types (houses, a woodcutter, and a stockpile). the world fills itself with a forest, and we swapped the old grid-style tree placement for a more organic scatter, so the woods read as natural clumps and clearings. the center of the map stays open on purpose, leaving room for the colony's heart.
villagers that do their own thing
the villagers got their first taste of independence. place a woodcutter and a villager walks out to a tree, chops it, carries the wood back to a stockpile, and goes looking for the next one with no hand-holding. they idle, wander, and pick their own targets. kinda basic and really inefficient but who cares, we're just trying to see if this will work!
food, the first real pressure
the big one for the day. i added hunger and a full food loop.
if you build an orchard it will lay out a tilled plot of fruit (or w/e idk) bushes. the bushes grow on their own, from sapling to growing to ripe, and a villager assigned to the orchard harvests the ripe ones and hauls the fruit to a granary (i know a granary probably has nothing to do with fruit but i just always associate it to my time playing Stronghold Crusader) to store it. meanwhile every villager gets hungry over time, and once hunger crosses a threshold they drop what they're doing, walk to a granary with food, and eat. you can tell when a villager is hungry because a color tint will takeover their body.