When creating the moodboard for Polder, I aimed to establish a clear visual style from a selection of real-world examples of the Dutch landscape and then unify this vision with examples of popular Real-Time Strategy games that have established industry standards for the genre.

Alongside this, I always focus on setting up a few colour palettes to narrow down the artistic style I will pursue for my games. In this case, I focused on a more stylised art style to complement a hexagonal grid and chose palettes focused on natural tones for the environment contrasted against muted but vibrant primary colours for gameplay structures.

To promote a greater level of depth and strategy when building the players civilisation, I established a scalable synergy system for placed structures to interact with one another. Each building type provides statistical benefits to other structures in the radius, with diminishing returns the further away the structures are from one another.

To make this system more approachable for the target audience of casual gamers, I split up the synergy levels into clearly distinguishable zones representable with coloured areas of the hexagon tiled grid in world space.

Because one of the project's main goals is to be primarily played as a virtual reality title, I needed to understand how users would navigate through the overall game software in virtual reality itself. I created a software architecture flowchart to establish where I would need to build 3D physicalized spaces and menu panels for game and menu navigation, and where the actual core gameplay loop would take place.

During this process I also established a retention loop secondary to the game's story progression in the form of narratively focused collectables and dioramas of the player's towns from each completed campaign level. Note: If the flowchart text is difficult to read, I recommend opening the image in a new tab.

I created this simplified core gameplay loop diagram to summarise the full core gameplay loop flowchart to clients and stakeholders that are less design oriented, and to more easily convey how the build and play round based system would loop through itself during the progression of a single campaign level.

During the build mode time is paused so that players can analyse and strategize in an approachable and casual manner with lots of breathing room, and during the play mode time is active and the player must witness the results of their actions established in the preceding build mode. This loops ten times in a given level, with each loop representing five years of historical progression in time for a total of fifty years of time per campaign level.

I established this flowchart to break down the core gameplay loop into a readable and cyclical pattern, and to build out the core flow into a robust enough format that I could clearly design how the majority of the game's features fit together within the core flow. This allowed me to work through the entirety of the game's features within the flowchart even before fully designing all of them (such as the combat system), while ensuring that they would flow together in the overall gameplay loop and be both robust and scalable enough to be suitable for the final commercial product.

Both flowcharts have been colour coded to the same standard. In the red segment of the chart the player is in build mode and time is paused, and in the blue segment time is ongoing and that portion of the flowchart loops on itself until the play mode has concluded. The green segment is for success and failure condition checks, as well as general score and resource checks for sub-objectives.

Note: If the flowchart text is difficult to read, I recommend opening the image in a new tab.

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