Soulash 2 Devlog 3 Map Maker 2.0 introduction

Greetings fellow gods,

Today's update will be shorter as I couldn't do as much work as usual. Unfortunately, I strained my hand, and I still have trouble typing. As you've probably read in the previous posts, we already have procedural worlds and a prototype of the procedural history simulation. Now it's time to generate region maps we'll discover.

Before I show you some progress, I want to say a couple of words about procedural generation in games, as it might give you some context to where this is going. I'm not too fond of procedural generation in most games. I never felt like it was such a crucial benefit to the game. Seeing that there are a gazillion unique locations to explore thanks to procedural content, I already know that most of them will be almost the same. The areas are often bland and uninteresting and don't encourage exploration aside from hunting enemies and looking for random treasure in differently placed corridors. I didn't want procgen to dictate how the world looks in the first Soulash because locations like the Capital would not be possible. However, I quickly felt there was a clear improvement by adding handcrafted locations to procedural regions and world maps.

And that's what I'm going to try in Soulash 2. The first step was to turn our existing Map Maker into Building Maker (probably more like a Location Maker in the future).

So now, instead of making an alternative region at a particular position, we'll be making handcrafted locations, buildings, and rooms that algorithms will place in the world and maybe post-process a bit. The buildings can span over 64x64 areas and have unlimited z-levels above and below. As you can see on the right side, the building templates have a cost, which I've integrated into History Simulation for the resource cost calculation. It might be used later for players when building settlements too.

For now, we only have buildings, and I didn't get to place them yet, but I hope that more traditional dungeons and caves will work as well with this system where we'll place rooms, and the algorithms will take care of connecting everything.

The second part necessary for this is Procedural Map Maker. This one is still early in development, as I'm configuring the first biome generation (forest) and experimenting with things, but here's how it looks now.

As you can see, the idea here is that we configure how a specific biome should look. We can add multiple configurations per biome with different entities and densities, and we'll have rivers, roads, and hills. Eventually, I will want to emphasize interactions with the world, like climbing, swimming, and harvesting resources, and add a lot more things to the locations.

And that will be it for today, I hope my hand will get better soon, and I'll be able to resume work with higher productivity. My goal for the next update will be to first flesh out the new Map Makers to have all of the procedural biomes that will reflect the world tiles and start combining both Procedural Map Maker with Building Maker to generate the first settlements.

Till next time,

Artur