A Story Driven Map

Well, I made the map generator. I made it in actionscript, and I made it render with Stage3D. It uses what I'm going to call a "story driven algorithm," which is to say a loose collection of heuristics that each aim to capture my ideas of what a good hand drawn map should look like. Things like how mountains fit together, how towns should be distributed, and how forests are seeded and grow over time. Things you may note, that are unrelated to plate tectonics, erosion, and such, and that don't rely on techniques like perlin noise.

  I think the story-driven metaphor might work for me. It might help me break out from a lot of the completionist and simulationist traps that I so easily fall into, while still providing the flexibility I'm after in the long run. Which is to say, I don't need to spend a few years carefully tuning an advanced perlin noise algorithm to give me an endless scalable fictional world, and I don't need to even start with that at all. I can start with the result I'm after: a hand drawn map. And as long as that map looks reasonable, I can stop there. The flexibility though.. that comes next.

Because when you have an algorithmically generated map, and algorithmically generated ancestors, well then you can get up to all sorts of algorithmically generated fun, can't you? Towns, Cities, Wars, Tombs, Catacombs, Villains, all the good stuff. All baked into the map before the game begins. As rich a fabric as you care to automatically weave.

But next, not that. Next, some kind of iteration on the first mission, the base, and the second mission.