Tartan & Clothes

I have been working on amplifying the Scottish character of the game. Obviously my first thought was tartan! Players can now choose their clan's colours and see that pattern become part of the settlement.

A Tartan for the Whole Village

The tartan editor lets you choose the primary and accent colours for your clan. Rather than making this a choice that only appears on one banner or menu, the selected pattern is used throughout the village.

Flags, carts, and other tartan-enabled decorations can take on the clan pattern. It is a small detail, but seeing the same colours appear in different corners of a settlement makes the place feel much more like it belongs to the people living there.

Once the pattern was appearing around the settlement, it felt wrong to stop at the buildings and decorations. The villagers are the clan, after all, so tartan now makes its way into the appropriate parts of their everyday clothes too.

This ties the people and the place together without making everybody look identical. Their hair, faces, and clothing still give them their own look, while the shared tartan gives the village a recognisable identity.

I wanted tartan to be more than a UI element that is selected and forgotten; it should be something that is really integrated into the settlement, from buildings and clothing to the UI, with more to come. Now that I've created this shader and tartan system, I can easily expand it to other things in the future.

Everyday Clothes and Work Clothes

This led into a newer clothing system. Villagers have ordinary clothes for their day-to-day lives, but jobs can also have their own work clothes. When it is time to work, a villager changes into the outfit for that role; when the work is finished, they change back into their usual clothes.

It makes the change from home life to work a little easier to read at a glance. A villager heading out to their job looks ready for it, then returns to their everyday outfit once their shift is over. Villagers who are pregnant, or otherwise not working, stay in their everyday clothes rather than changing into a work outfit.

There is plenty more clothing to add over time, and the potential to open up the Tailor role to a lot of possibilities when I create it. But for now, the important part is that the game feels far more thematically Scottish now that clan tartan can be created, and it has a visible effect around the settlement.