Garages!

Pretty much all the houses now have garages. Why not add them? It would make it easier to find a few tools and maybe have a low chance to spawn with a car in it. But them again, house spawning is… strange to say the least. I once got a bathroom the size of a bedroom. Food for thought, anyway.

Size.

Houses right now are something like 21x21 tiles IIRC. If we add a garage to houses that would take up a majority of space. And not leave enough for bathrooms the size of [size=1pt]your mama[/size]bedrooms, or kitchens for armies.

But if we could get around the size issue than I would be all for this.

I agree, it would be a nice addition, although I wouldn’t expect to find high value tools in there for balancing reasons.

For me it’s the little things that would bring Cata homes to life, boundary fences around most houses, footpaths and mailboxes to name a few.

I can imagine after initial features have been developed the Devs will flesh out towns a bit more. I read somewhere about town names and signposts, non essential features that give the world flavor.

How about just morphing another quadrant that acts as an open room on one side, no car just tools.

Houses will no doubt go through a complete remodeling once we have Z levels. I imagine houses can/will take up less real-estate when bedrooms don’t have to be on the main floor. So we might get smaller footprints with second floors, at which point tacking a garage on wouldn’t be a big deal. Personally I’d like to see houses that take up more than one ‘grid’ square anyway. Yards with stuff in them, detached and attached garages, fences around yards, swimming pools. There’s a lot of variety that could be going into houses but isn’t just yet.

“balancing reasons” eh…

The problem I find with this is realism (like, there actually being power tools all over a garage, probably even a chainsaw or 2) over balancing. You cant have one or the other without someone moaning that either “its not realistic” or “its too easy”…

But, thats no help. I support the idea, prime place to put in circular saws.

Saw blade launcher, anyone? Anyway, we’d have problem of people just staying in a house with a pool for water, but that’s beside the point. Maybe there’s types pf garages. Some with bikes, cars, workbench/tools, some with nothing in them and houses with no garage at all.
THINK ABOUT ALL THE POSSIBILITYS FOR THIS GAEM

The current houses are possibly more like what you get with older construction in-town, I almost wonder if a typical suburban lot would end up being doube wide or double deep compared to current houses.

Actually the whole “submit your house layout to put it in the game” thing we’re doing with the kickstarter will force us to address this, because we’ll have to figure out how to accomodate the various layouts people have, and that’ll in turn influence overall house generation.

We could try a randomly generated house algorithm. Something like kitchen must be AxB, bathroom CxD and bedroom ExF, and all other rooms to follow, with ranges for all variables. But I guess that sorta takes away from the kickstarter reward huh?

I’d also like to see irregularly shaped houses. Houses aren’t all square. Even the mansions are pretty boring. It’s just a square full of rectangular rooms.

More varied and interesting houses would go a long way toward improving the exploration factor of the game. I’m curious to see what comes from the Z layers and new house layouts.

Oh, the kickstarter reward is that we put a house matching your house or building layout of choice in the game, not that the rewards are the ONLY ones (That’s the pledge level I’m in for, and I’ll probably end up importing my own house, heh). Better house layout generation is definitely something we want to look into. Good point about the all square houses, that’s also a problem.

With multi-z levels things like duplexes (either side-by-side or over/under) and apartments become more feasable too. Lots of opportunity for variety.