I gave up on the Ultima tiles, they don’t minimap well. Right now I’m generating my minimap by drawing the base sprite at a really small size; the amount of black in the Ultima tiles made that impossible.
Plus, I could not resist the pretty.
In the minimap area you can see the results of my terrain generation algorithm, which I’m liking a lot for the size and style of landmasses it creates. The number/layout of the special terrain tiles like hills, swamp and desert leave a bit to be desired but I can fix that later.
Plus we’ve got cities and units on the map. They currently do not belong to any team and are non-interactwithabble. That will change very, very soon.
I have 32 hours left. The two most complex things in the game will be the AI (the prototype WILL have one) and the tech tree. AI can’t really be done until the base systems are in, so I’ll probably start that around the 30-hour mark. So putting in the tech tree now would probably be a good idea.
I’m currently thinking about dividing the tree into three basic areas – combat, science and culture. And instead of a tree I’m thinking of a wheel, since all three can interact to provide additional options. Hopefully I can get a mockup of that soon.
It’s funny how the 3 hour difference is a week apart in blog posts 🙂 I like the wheel idea for the tech-tree, sort of like Settlers VII.
Hey! I’ve been busy!
Okay, I spent all weekend playing Fallout: New Vegas instead of working.
Summation: Good game, but not great. Lots of rough edges (like quests that cannot be completed) that Bethesda would have sanded off if they’d made the game. On the other hand, I love Veronica, she’s my favorite companion of all time.
And while I own Settlers VII, I haven’t played enough of it to get to the tech tree, so I had no idea it did that! I’ll have to check that out.
Good to hear of progression 😀
I enjoyed New Vegas a lot as well. I liked the funny/stupid humor they put into the game (which I only later found out was mostly due to a perk I picked in the game’s start), and the modding community is great. Surprisingly enough, the shooting is actually pretty good as well. I like how I can strategically toggle limbs to hobble/disarm an opponent. Very cool.
And then there is the dynamite pants. I LOVE the dynamite pants, and spent much of the game forcing the NPCs of the world to love it too.
You did all that in 8 hours?!? And I’ve been working on my game for over a month and my terrain generator does some pretty crappy continents. Your continent is awesome, I like how it takes a little bend there. I’m assuming it’s a randomly generated world, because it looks pretty random and there’s no way you could have edited that in 8 hours anyway. How come the little house is surrounded by water?
Yes, the worlds are randomly generated. I start by seeding about 20 random tiles with mountains, then on every pass I pick a random blank tile next to a current tile and assign it a terrain type based on the terrain type before it (for instance, mountains tend to generate hills next to them). Thus, the seeded mountains create land areas that grow into each other. When I’ve got about 70% of the terrain generated I fill the rest of the map with water.
And the reason that city is surrounded by water is because I’m just throwing cities and units across the map randomly for test purposes. 🙂