Hey! Don't forget to check out Wholesome Direct this Saturday :)
Wholesome Direct
This month we made a lot of progress in how our game world is put together and designed.
The way our game world works is a bit like a puzzle. We have individual pieces that we design by hand, and then the game automatically pieces them together to create the world. We can rotate pieces, randomize where the connection points are and add some random content into the pieces for some additional variety. This way we can create a unique world for every player while still having a lot of manual control over the design of the pieces to make them look beautiful and interesting.
Here's what our editor for these pieces looks like:
We can add terrain to a piece, define where the playable area and possible connections to other pieces are and add decorations.
This isn't a tool that's intended for players currently, but eventually it would be really cool to make it available for everyone and to allow sharing player-created map pieces.
For gameplay, the idea is that players don't have access to the entire world from the start. You start in a certain location and then gradually get access to additional areas.
When we initially worked on this system a few years ago we thought it would be the best idea to pre-generate the entire world when you start a new save file and then mark everything outside the starting area "unexplored" - so it exists, you just can't access it yet. We thought generating the whole world at once would make things a bit easier for us, like controlling how the game progresses (like for example putting more advanced resource types further away from your starting area).
Here's a screenshot from a tool we used to prototype this. The colored boxes show which parts of the terrain come from the same puzzle piece, the light grey background shows the playable area and the darker grey shows the border around the playable area where we generate the forest.
Short green lines mark the connections between pieces and there's also some generated rivers in blue.
There's some problems with pre-generating the entire world though:
- it's kind of wasteful to generate stuff that the player hasn't unlocked yet (takes up space in the savegame file and might require loading more data than necessary)
- if we add more pieces to the game, players have to create a completely new save file and restart their town to have a chance to encounter them
We changed that this month. Now pieces only get added to the world once you unlock a new area.
This has been on our task list for a long time, so it feels really good to finally have it done!
And we started replacing our placeholder test pieces with properly designed ones.
It makes a huge difference for how alive the world feels and instantly makes everything look a lot more interesting and nicer, so that is a lot of fun for us :)
It's very exciting to see how every single piece being added immensely increases the variety of worlds being generated!
