Part 3, Rimworld: Analysis of Room Types in Games
Rimworld (2013 Alpha, Ludeon Studios)
Fast forward almost two decades and you have Rimworld. This game is a little different from the Bullfrog games in that the game doesn’t itself have a notion of rooms. It knows about indoor spaces and outdoor spaces, but that’s about it. You can build and place various objects into the world (tables, chairs, etc), but at no point except in the player’s mind do you actually get a room. If you want a kitchen, you throw up some walls and put a stove in there. Dining room? Place some tables together with adjacent chairs. Bedrooms are just beds that happen to have beds in them.
What you start with:
If you click Architect in the bottom left, you get a small options menu with 12 different options – most for building, some not:
If you click Structure, you see Door and Wall (not shown: clicking on one prompts you for a material).
You can now click and drag on the terrain. It creates a straight line of faux-structure – white lines indicating where your “pawns” (the colonists) will build.
I made an enclosed space and placed a door on one side:
We’ll soon have what will vaguely resemble a room. Now to make it into a bedroom, we browse to Furniture.
Click Bed, and we get a green ghost whereever we hover the mouse, if it’s in a valid location.
Then click to place, and it becomes a blue ghost, and our pawns get to work!
Resources are collected and dropped off at the site. When they do, the outline disappears and is replaced with a progress-scaffold sort of outline, while the pawns construct (using a blowtorch, apparently) the structures and items.
Making progress.
Bed is done, now.
You can place floors much the same way, except of course that it’s still walkable.
Floors are almost done.
Tada, completed room.
Minor things to notice – there is a light/shadow engine built in, so areas of darkness actually look dark…and that Rimworld doesn’t do windows! if you want lighting, you either plop a torch on the ground (which you have to “refill” periodically), or you need a standing lamp, which requires electricity. So if you wanted candles, or oil lamps, or windows…too bad.