Going isometric, an economy and five ways to draw a frog

Day two was a big one. By the end of it there was a map you look at from an angle, workers with jobs, a computer opponent, an art style and sound.

Movement

Units find their way with flow fields, which is basically one shared map of “go this way from here” for everyone heading to the same spot. The test sends 50 units in five groups across an open map and then through a gap two tiles wide, and nobody gets stuck.

The first run had four frogs arrive early and settle down, and then the next four groups marched straight through them and carried them along like a bulldozer. Settled units that get shoved now walk back to their spot.

Workers

Frogs gather food from bug bushes and wood from reeds, and cut reeds turn into ground you can walk on. Rats get a cheaper, faster economy, and that all lives in the data, so nothing in the code actually knows what a rat is.

The first opening only gathered about half what it should have. Every worker was being sent to the same bush, only a few fit round it and the rest just queued. Now they pick the quietest bush nearby, and gathering doubled. A simple bot learned to play an opening too, keeping the Town Center busy and building houses before it runs out of room.

What should it look like?

Claude drew the same little scene five ways: storybook, cut paper, painterly, a 3D toy diorama and pixel art.

What I wanted was somewhere between the toy and the pixel art, so we tried a sixth, proper 3D with realistic lighting. It looked impressive but it felt wrong. The frogs turned into different characters and the lighting went a level too far. In the games I grew up with you never think about the lighting.

So we kept the characters and changed how they’re made. Every part is a small 3D model, with textures Claude drew, baked down into pixel art. Buildings follow your culture too, and paths get laid out for you. Romans should get nice roads, so they do.

Sound

Every sound comes from our own little synthesiser written in Python. Chopping, mining, button clicks, a voice for every creature, and a theme that adds instruments as you go up the ages. Nobody had actually heard any of it when it was done, it was all checked by the numbers. When I listened, the first chop sounded like a drum. Took three tries.

By the evening the rats were raiding the frogs’ town on their own.