A typical embark location with a wheat farm and mill

Inspiration

When thinking about the word "connections," many concepts spring to mind. Perhaps social media or transportation are foremost. However, as someone who enjoys all things "video game," I wanted to build something you could play. At first, I thought of the popular Mini Metro game, and even considered a Clue-inspired game (connecting clues in your mind!), but then I thought more about road networks and how they not only connected towns, but people. This is what inspired me to make Connection Kingdom!

What it does

Connection Kingdom is a turn-based resource management game which relies heavily on the player's ability to quickly send settlers across the "game board" and reconnect back to the capital and with each other. Resources are sent

How I built it

Connection Kingdom is built with the Unity game engine and with C#. After an hour or two of brainstorming and architecting, I began building. At first, I worked alone, and spent a lot of time working through terrain generation. I quickly realized that time was not on my side. More on that next:

Challenges I ran into

As with all hackathons, time is always the toughest constraint. Getting a high quality product in such a short amount of time is incredibly difficult, especially for a game. However, with Claude's help, I was able to expedite much of this process. Besides the issue of time, there was also the issue of balance. I have always known that resource management games require careful balancing to achieve the right amount of challenge, but experiencing it firsthand was truly a surprising experience. It was more difficult than I thought, but I really had fun tweaking all the game's settings to create what I believe is a decent balance. Now, I just need more playtesters!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I finally learned terrain generation, even if its appearance in the game ended up being quite minimal. Regardless, I am also proud of the concept, and I actually ended up having fun playing the game!

What I learned

I learned how Unity's terrain generation works, how to implement a shortest-path algorithm for a hexagonal grid, and how difficult it can be to balance a resource management game!

What's next for Connection Kingdom

I want to add better 3D models and textures to really make this game stand out. As you can tell, it is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous Unity prefabs with some quickly-made textures in Paint.NET. It is ready for a makeover!