Ink wash city builder: the Ink style paints the city with a brush

Same city, a different hand

Ink is not a filter laid over the glyphs. It is a second way of drawing the same map. Every building, field, tree and walker has its own ink drawing, made from a neutral description of the building: its yard and fence, its halls, roofs, platforms and details. The glyph style follows the same map, which is why both styles always agree on where a building stands and which way a gate faces. How the glyph city is put together is told in how we draw a whole city with text characters.

There is no stand-in picture anywhere. Every kind of building in every epoch, at every level, has an ink drawing of its own, and a test keeps it that way.

Five epochs, five looks

• Xia and Shang: thatch and clay, simple shapes, palisades around the camps; power gets the first tiled roofs and red walls
• Zhou: tiled roofs for everyone, crenellations on the walls
• Qin: heavy dark roofs on high platforms, a Great Wall of stone
• Han: cinnabar, an extra tier on important halls, whitewashed houses and sharply curled eaves

Fields are painted row by row for each crop and stage: millet with drooping heads, dense wheat, rice in flooded paddies, beans, cabbages, tall hemp and tea bushes on terraces, from fresh furrows to sheaves at the edge of a ripe field. A house shows its level, from the stakes of an empty plot through a thatched hut and a whitewashed house to a two-storey home under cinnabar.

Paper, water and roads

The ground is not made of tiles. It is painted in one pass over the whole screen: paper with fibres and faint stains, grey-blue water that grows darker towards the bank, a shoreline in dry brush, ochre roads with ragged edges, plank bridges and the grey slabs of a paved road. Grass and fibres fade out when a tile gets small, so from afar you see only washes, as in a landscape scroll.

That also makes Ink light to run. At the far zoom levels it is faster than glyphs: on a Han quarter we measured 4.1 ms per frame against 8.2 ms, on a Mac in a 1600×1000 window. Up close the two are about even. The ink code, a few dozen kilobytes compressed, is downloaded only if you choose it.

Weather, fire and night in ink

• Rain falls in brush strokes with a dry tail; snow drifts in soft grey-blue spots and settles white on ridges, walls and treetops
• A flood spreads from the river as a wash; locusts are a cloud of tiny strokes, each with two wings
• Fire grows in cinnabar through its stages and leaves charred posts and black smoke; drought cracks the ground
• At dusk windows and lanterns light up in a wave from the heart of the city, and at night two passers-by in five carry a paper lantern on a pole
• Shadows follow the sun: long to one side in the morning, short at noon, long to the other towards sunset
• At the Spring Festival paper lanterns hang over the streets, and fireworks burst in cinnabar and gold only

The weather and the calendar behind it are described in rain, snow and the Spring Festival.

Still made of text underneath

Hold the ` key and the ink washes away in a wave from the cursor, showing the raw characters the city is made of; let go and the brush comes back. Show glyphs and .txt snapshots work in both styles.

How to switch it on

Settings → Graphics → Art style: glyphs or ink. The change happens at once, without a restart, and the choice is remembered. It is only a look: your game and saves do not know about it, and in co-op each player can use a different style. Glyphs stay the default, and if you never touch the setting, nothing changes for you.

A third, optional look grew out of these same ink drawings: the Painted style. The glyph city remains the face of the game, and the home page shows it in motion; 32×16 detail is where it is sharpest.

Glyph Dynasty is coming to Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux. Watch the clips, read about this in the development history and see this part of the game; for journalists there is a press kit.