Game Update : World Building

When I started this blog, I wanted to share with you my thoughts on certain game-related subject matter or giving you updates on my LetPlay video series (whenever or not there are technical issues or what-not).

I don't necessarily want to turn this blog into a game dev blog but, considering that my project has taken a lot of my attention, I feel like there isn't much else to talk about.  So here we go:

Back in January 2014, I wrote a blog entry here vaguely talking about the four major milestones that I had planned during the production of my game:

• - World building
• - NPC/Monster AI
• - Combat
• - Story

It's been a year since then and I'm very happy to say that we're in the [world building] stage of development.  I guess you could say that we've officially started production.
You've most likely seen images of my visual dungeon generator prototype by now (in earlier blog entries) and that's one of the biggest aspects of the world building stage.  I had planned to showcase a video tour/demo of this prototype on Youtube (a year ago) but it was delayed because we kept adding more and more cool stuff to it.  Now-a-days, the prototype is considered complete as far as the coding is concerned, but we're delaying the showcase some more in order to add more art pieces and make it all pretty.

While my buddy is busy doing more artwork for the prototype, I'm redirecting my attention elsewhere: the world.

...

The world map, that is:

What you see here are rough grayscale representations of the terrain; in the sense that whiter squares are higher terrain (ex: mountains).  So, basically, my world generator is procedurally generating an entire globe where each square roughly represents and area that's 20 minutes worth of gameplay (give or take).

As of this writing, the parameters of the world are such that I can make the world as big as I want (currently set at an average of 550 playable overworld areas) and the landscape will be automatically distributed to a random set of nations, laying down cities, etc.

The idea is that these nations will eventually govern NPC behaviors so that their personalities won't be randomly out of control.  Military, Religous, Racist, Peaceful, Festive, Social, Savage, Honor, Poor,  are but a few keywords I have in mind to mix-match in order to create interesting and different nations for my NPCs to live in.

Is the nation primarily set in the moutains?  What are the odds of them being good blacksmiths and/or followers of a fire-related cult?  That kind of thing.

Right now it's pretty crude and simple, but I'll be elaborating it over time.  It kind of looks like a game of Risk :P