Personally, one of the most pleasant aspects of any game of similar strategy genre is observing your territorial expansion. In this post, I’ll showcase how territory is depicted and demo a new feature – minimap. In the game, your territory is defined by how many businesses are under your protection (“extorted”), your owned properties, and illegal-business annexes. You can look at in 3 modes: tactical map, city map, and minimap!
Territory
Each building stamped not just on its own footprint but expanded outward by a few tiles (scaling with building size). So you grow territory by running orders that take buildings. Each family’s contribution is cached and only rebuilt when one of its orders succeeds and where two families’ expanded areas overlap the territory tiles are contested.
It’s drawn as a GPU overlay: ground_program renders each controlled building’s expanded quad into an offscreen mask, MAX-blending each family’s color per channel, and composite.frag tints the ground with that color, painting diagonal stripes wherever two families’ territories collide.
In the below video, I toggle the territorial overlay to see the current territorial holdings in tactical as well as city map views.
In this video, you can see how territory grows as your extort orders succeed.
Next, we’ll do a bit of scouting to find our enemies:
Finally, you can see how the territorial claims clash together when families meet at the edges:
Minimap
In the video below, the minimap displays 3 toggles territorial overlay, business establishment types (commercial, residential, industrial) and economic strength heatmap. Both views are available in three views: tactical, minimap and…
… city map:
Going forward I’ll focus more on the show aspect of the show-and-tell. Thanks!
