New Buildings and Tiles | Chains – Devlog #2

Hello everyone! In this episode, I’m continuing work on the playtest level for my second playtest, which is planned for next week.

Stationary Monsters

The first playtest happened a few weeks ago and led to a major change in how the carriers behave. Originally, the carriers would physically move one tile per beat, meaning players had to carefully sync their movement to the rhythm. But that turned out to be a bit too tricky and frustrating. So now, the monsters are stationary and simply throw goods on their assigned beat. For this new playtest, I’ve added a simple dialogue system. Our central monster gives the player small tasks—starting with placing a mushroom collector.

Restricted Placement

To make things a bit more interesting, not all monsters can be placed anywhere. Most of them require a specific tile type to function. For example, the mushroom collector needs to be placed on a mushroom tile. To make that work, I use custom data in the tilemap and flag the mushroom tiles with a boolean. Then I check whether the player is hovering over a valid tile—and only allow placement if the tile is suitable.

To give clearer feedback, I tint the monster red if the spot isn’t valid. I also added an error sound when the player tries to place a monster somewhere it doesn’t belong. Next, I started thinking about which production chain would make for a good next step in complexity.

The Worm Cooker

I decided to add a new type of monster: the Worm Cooker. It needs both worms and water to produce food for the center. That means I needed two new tile types: one for worm sources (where players can place worm catchers), and one for hot lava stones, which monsters can use to cook. (In my headcanon, they find fire unnecessary and too bright.)

Before using these tiles, I had to update the worm catcher and water collector. I’d implemented them earlier, but they were still missing some basic functionality. Also, the worm catcher was still sharing its sprite with the mushroom picker—so I fixed that.

Now that those tile types and rules are in place, the player can only place worm catchers on worm tiles, water collectors on water tiles, and worm cookers on heat sources. Every other placement is blocked.

To make the worm cooker a bit more challenging, I thought it would be interesting if both required goods—worms and water—had to arrive on the same beat. This opens the door for more timing-based logic in the game. In the future, I also want to add support for goods to be delivered in a specific order, like water first, then worms.

At the moment, each monster already uses an array for incoming goods, but I haven’t implemented logic to check whether all required goods are present. That’s something I’ll be working on next week. Thank you for reading or watching!