I lost much of yesterday to a migraine, and what time was left to the far more insidious beast of fiddling with procedural generation parameters.

I’m now wildly behind schedule, but I do have it consistently generating landscapes that I feel pleased with. It may be a little presumptuous to say but I think it does a good job of not looking too much like generic procedural landscape. Mainly thanks to a little hydraulic erosion simulation that produces neat cliff features, and some free mixing of mountainous and rolling hills terrain. I’m also really pleased with how the colouring and shading have turned out. Other progress is in creating nice chunk of heightmap processing code and smarter vertex buffer updating to my library, but that doesn’t show up so well in screenshots. Tomorrow I’ll implement water and I promise that will look nice in [animated] screenshots.

I’ve developed a much better idea of where the game’s headed with its mechanics and theme, even if it is at best skirting along the borders of the People’s Republic of Real Time Strategy. Originally the concept was that the player is the spirit of the landscape guiding a settlement in its growth and war through their use of various abilities to morph the landscape and control weather (‘sup, Populous). But I think there’s probably enough games about killing people, so I’m moving the focus towards the nurturing aspects that can be found buried deep in base building RTS games. Caring for the tiny people as they scamper about: smoothing over a mountain to make way for crops here, channel a river somewhere useful, that kind of thing.

I’m a little apprehensive as the spectre of traditional game design keeps telling me the player needs a clear goal with a direction they can take towards the win state. And for there to be a win state. I shall offer up some appeasement through having abilities unlocked by completing tasks in the game. For instance having a certain amount of crops growing will unlock the ability to raise new mountains. Although what the player must do to unlock each ability will not be shown, I aim to provide good feedback on when they’re making progress towards an unlock. That should create an impetus in the player to both care for their people so the population grows (which is sure to unlock something), and to experiment with their abilities in novel ways to find how to unlock more. Kind of like achievements, but without being bullshit extrinsic rewards.

That sounds like a lot of stuff for a game that’s meant to be finished in four days’ time. So it’s not quite a real time strategy game, and it’s very unlikely to be done in seven days. But other than that 7dRTS is going great for me.