Becoming Pablo DevLog #1 – Behind the Code with Gary, Lead Programmer

Introduction and Project Background

Hi everyone, my name is Gary and I’m the lead programmer for Becoming Pablo at Tentworks Interactive! I am excited to get into talking a bit about the behind-the-scenes work we do here to make the game tick. To start off I’d like to give a bit of background on the project.

Past Challenges with City Block Builder

I started at Tentworks several years ago working on our last project, City Block Builder. The project itself was immensely fun to work on. Unfortunately, we ran into too many challenges while building the game and achieving its vision. One key point was that we simply did not have enough manpower to get what we wanted done. For some time, I was actually the only programmer on the team!

The Birth of Becoming Pablo

At the end of 2022, we made the very tough decision to let go of the project. It was very sad as there was a lot of potential and we had accrued many followers from conventions who were very excited to see the final product. However, there is a certain serendipity in starting over. With renewed vigor and passion, Becoming Pablo was born.

Gamescom Success and Building a Strong Team

We started fervently recruiting people to help us build the game, and I’m happy to say the team today is strong, cohesive, creative, and well-rounded. Recently, we presented the game at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany at a little booth of our own and the reception was heartening and promising, especially given that realistically we had only been developing it for over a year.

Evaluating Development Progress and Foundational Systems

In classic dev behavior, I will always have certain biases, criticisms, or even blindness to its state and progress. My case is no different and it’s been difficult for me to evaluate it honestly. Mere months ago it felt like we were still missing many gameplay foundational systems. What I mean by a “foundational system” is one that exists at least prototyped out in code that serves as the foundation for a gameplay feature, experience, or polish that has yet to be designed or simply coded out. I always want things to be better, but I can honestly say that the game is progressing very well.

Narrative Systems – A Work in Progress

Some systems are more fleshed out than others or even have a lot more content. The main story for not one but two campaigns have been implemented over the last few months, causing our narrative systems (conversation systems, objective systems, etc.) to be under heavy development. Of course, the story isn’t completely done, as I’m sure there will be many iterations and additions to it over time. In many parts of the narrative, there are placeholders for things like custom scripted events or the cartel family system (your “family” – not literally blood-related – of trusted lieutenants and commanders who serve under you) that are still fairly barebones. We still have much design to go over for that but will flesh it out when we can find the time.

AI Development and Challenges

We also have other systems that are leap-frog dependent, so to say. What makes any good game great is a smart, responsive AI that will challenge the player and react to the player’s actions. I initially implemented a very basic AI handling the most basic of actions such as building units, buildings, moving units around to defend, and randomly attacking neighbors in the World Map part of the game. This system has served well for quite some time but as the game has increased in complexity we have needed to implement other systems, such as farming system, territory/region system, spy actions, and diplomacy. At the time the first basic AI was written, none of these things existed. Now most of these do exist, or at least some early version of them.

It can be very difficult to spend effort on a system like AI without having a full ecosystem of actions and consequences that could occur and implement their effects. For many months, the basic AI system was in place without much change to it. Now, I think we have reached a critical mass where we can finally start thinking about those very specific logic chains of interactions and decision-making that the AI will have to go through to reach particular heuristics and goals. We have AI that we want to be Ghandi-level aggressive and some others that will focus more on industriousness. We are currently designing and iterating on a system that can incorporate overarching macro goals as well as reacting to individual events and make plans that can play out over multiple turns. We are still early in this process and I would definitely like to share more details in the future as they continue to develop.

UI and Gameplay Iterations

Besides AI, we have our hands in other pots too. We’re always working on making our UI more intuitive, responsive, and informative. Building roads in the Base Camp was one pain point that was made clear at Gamescom, so we have tweaked it to make it simpler for those who want straight point A-to-B pathing to connect their roads and bases as well as a toggle option to use Bezier curves to connect roads together for a more natural, organic feel. 

RTS Mode Enhancements

We have also been iterating on our RTS attack/defense game mode in which you must attack or defend a home territory. For those who are unfamiliar, we have an RTS mode which is triggered when the home base of a cartel is under attack (including your own). This is the only way for a faction to lose the game. Initially, in order to showcase this feature we had to hack together a very rigid experience in order to showcase its presence at all. However, now one of our developers has been hard at work at refactoring and making the system flexible so that we can easily define all sorts of attack and defense environments.

Balancing Old and New Features

Finally, on top of everything we have been working on, we are also constantly going back and improving gameplay that has already been worked on. Previously acceptable design or implementation no longer becomes acceptable as the game grows and becomes more complex. Oftentimes we will have to leave a feature and come back to it as its requirements become clear. This can make it difficult to balance between making new features and dusting off and improving old ones. The good news is that we’re getting it done, and at the end of every month we feel pride in what we’ve done so far, looking back on the month and realizing how much better it is.

Looking Ahead

I hope this overview has been helpful and provided some insight into what we’re up to now. In future logs, myself and my colleagues plan to focus on a couple of key issues of the month. Be it with the arts team, gameplay team, or marketing team, we will dive more into features and challenges that we’re tackling. For now, thank you very much for reading and I hope you all have a great day! As always, reach out to us on our Discord if you have more questions.

Gary Chao, Tentworks Interactive

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