Still restless. I keep going over Tiny Game, Legacy, and other ideas in my head, trying to get an angle, a piece I can bite off and chew. One angle I really kindof like is the super-rich story generation we had going on earlier. I think if we added some metadata to that stuff that made it more meaningful (stats, historical figures, connections, questlines), then it could be a really interesting sort of sandbox, a funny mix of auto-generation and careful hand-crafting. It might be quite pleasing.
One thing that keeps, keeps tripping me up is the world map. I see stuff like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft and it's ridiculously intimidating. I don't have 2-3 years to tune my world generator. And it seems like a waste to chase that particular train anyway. It's already left the station.
So what about a flat, abstract map, with "hand drawn" features like mountains, forests, the kind of world map that a FF 2-6 game might boast? A collection of biomes, globbed together? That seems like a reasonable canvas, right?
If that level of fidelity is our baseline, then there's a 'town' tile that you zoom into, where ---NO!
nope. There are characters, who have interesting backstories, who move between abstract towns. Towns have stats and citizens even but not maps. Over time we'll build up either a site map generator or a collection of hand drawn site maps. But it doesn't matter much, because that's just for the combat, and should serve the needs of the combat.
The balance between farmers and bandits is something that no game I've ever played has gotten right. Between rabbits and wolves. But if towns are abstract, why not simulate 100 peasants for every bandit? What the hell. It's not like it's that expensive. Then just let people die and be buried, let random encounters create nameless graves that dot the landscape, a network of named sites with rich histories built by the real people of the land. On THAT canvas have a series of missions. Over time improve the fidelity of the auto-generated terrain, histories, and monsters.
Wow how do I always go here? I always end up back at simulating the effing world.
Remember that Crystalis game Isaac was talking about? It could also live in this sort of world. Well. Someday. Not at first.
It seems like all sign point towards "Nate wants to do some world generation." So here goes. It will be exposed as a service in the legacy server, legacy.debug.world.generate.
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