Polonnaruwa #0 | Hello, Coconuts!

21st May, 2024

Today, I'm proud to announce Polonnaruwa, my latest attempt at a game, using Rust and Bevy.

Polonnaruwa is (or, will be) a post-classical city builder that embraces the huge scale of cities unseen before. Players will create grand cities with tens of thousands of citizens, and dozens of supporting towns and villages around to feed resources to the capital. Players will be responsible for planning new structures, ensuring the rain reaches the paddy fields, and most importantly, building beautiful maps!

My Goals

I have one (ok, maybe two) goal(s) with Polonnaruwa. I want to finish this game.

I am a chronic restarter. At the time of writing, I have 76 repositories in my Github, most of which are abandoned games and half baked ideas. While this is fun and quirky, my body has declared it will forcibly remove my brain from the position of Benevolent Dictator for Life unless I finish something for once, so here I am.

I also hope that in writing this I hold myself more accountable than I have in the past, through you, dear reader. Screenshots are both pretty, and also make me showcase my progress. I enjoy writing about things too, and what better to write about but my current project. I think this is going to be great for me in the long run.

Polonnaruwa version today: A humble beginning, that's for sure.

My second (not-)goal is to make the cities have a sense of scale. I'm kinda done playing city builders where there's a grand city with a roaring industry, or enough power to dominate everyone around it, and it has .... 3000 citizens? 200?! 31 even??!? (I'm looking at you, Civ & EU4). I want Polonnaruwa to be able to support 10s of thousands, perhaps even 100s of citizens going about their day to day, and really make the city pop because of it.

The Plan

As of writing this, I'm a few months into development, using mostly spare time after work and on the weekends. Because of this, progress is slow, but I'm proud of what I have right now. For my next post (#1), I'll talk more on what I've done over those months, including more of the technical things that I've learnt and discovered along the way.

After that, I hope to post (semi-)regularly, about my updates, progress, and other ideas I've had along the way. I think that'll be a fun way to sharpen my writing skills, while also documenting that yes, I have done this one.

Fun Fact

Parakramabahu the Great , king of Polonnaruwa, ordered:

Not even a drop of water that comes from the rain must flow into the ocean without being made useful to man

The result was the construction of 65 large wewa (reservoirs), in addition to the 2376 renovated minor wewa across Sri Lanka during his reign. He musta been very busy to do all that!