Being able to build big plaps of landscape is one thing, but earth is nothing without water.
Water is one thing I do not miss from my Warcraft III days. It was at a fixed level (give or take some dodginess), it didn’t flow in any particular direction, and it had very little impact on gameplay. The best rivers were pure decoration constructed from massively skewed waterfall models.
No, it’s time for me to break free and do rivers properly.
I mentioned in my last post that when I first tried to make hand-crafted levels, I lacked the tools to make it work; hence my slide into the clutches of procedural generation. So what’s changed?
Why, I’ve started to reimplement the Warcraft III terrain editor.
The Worm Ouroboros, that forever eateth its own tail. That’s my development cycle.
I spent a year and a half, maybe even two years, building Exon as a procedurally-generated dungeon crawler. Over that time I rewrote the level generator at least six times, edging ever closer to a system that would actually make nice playable levels and not be insane to extend and tweak.
Then I decided it was time to finally attempt natural cave levels to break up the bunkers, and the whole thing fell apart again. Feeling that the near-constant rewrites of the level generator suggested a more fundamental problem with my approach, I have decided to change direction.
Pretty much everything I do in Unity, I compare to what I could do in Warcraft III. One of the most surprising (to me at least) omissions was the ability to make custom materials. That is, being able to layer, blend and animate textures to create a final look for your characters.
In this strange modern worlds, such things require one to make shaders. That means a whole heap of extra programming work, and some pretty esoteric programming at that.
Then they invented lovely graph-based shader builders.
What’s in a name? A game as called by any other name would smell as sweet, or so the old Romeo and Juliet quote goes. But I’m not sure that I agree, Shakespeare, because as lots of classical fantasy and folklore will attest, names have power.
For as I’ve been working on this game project of mine, I have been pondering what to call it. This is difficult for me because, as a shallow man in thrall to the shape and the power of words, it’s got to be a good name, and fulfill many criteria that others might consider to be… a bit facetious.
Either way, this is a very important project to me, so it has to be just right — and as I’ve decided that 2018 will be The Year Of a Release, I can wait no longer. It must be named.
It’s the most productive time of the year! That means it’s time to tackle those big problems that put the fear into you at in any other season. But with a couple weeks of holiday? Oh yes.
Over the weeks leading up to crimbo, I was dancing around, adding little new features and refining systems. I put decorations into the bunkers, added vending machines and guard posts, deleted the crap code that was failing to do these things before — the level generator is, dare I say it, looking pretty damn good.
The next step, then, is to take this mishmash of content and make it… into a campaign.
Yep, that’s four years since I started work on this game — it still has no name (that’s a lie, it almost has a name), but it is still blisteringly consistent with the original vision. So assuming that my constant ramblings haven’t been too coherent over the years, here’s a video so you can acquaint yourself with what it’s actually like. Also includes audio commentary if you just want to hear my dulcet tones for a bit!
Like, comment and subscribe?
Oh yes, it’s the most productive time of the year!
Well, maybe last year I got ahead of myself. The 36-feature plan I gave myself three weeks of holiday to complete in the end took more than six months (bar one remaining feature, the Towers of Hanoi puzzle, for which I have some lovely ideas). Plans, it seems, are not really my strength.
What, then, shall this festive period hold for my still-unnamed magnum opus?
