“Why stand on a silent platform?… Part 1”
My dabbling in the build system was a deviation from the roadmap. As a result its Q1 2024 and strayed far away from keeping on point with developing the essential game loop. So following the chorus of the song referenced in the title of this article, eff the norm – lets double down and talk about town building!
Following on from the build and map systems I have previously talked about, I have setup a realm data structure that is used in the campaign mode for providing fixed and randomised realm and capital city characteristics to the game based on an initial world generation. In future this can be better extended for a procedural world builder step that will allow increased customisation in the games sandbox mode.
The issue with extending “surface” features such as the mapping system into cool areas is that you are quickly enticed into building up their depth at the expense of your other plans. As soon as I put realms and capital towns on the map, I really wanted them to start having real world representations to explore in game. To do this I put together quite a simple L-System algorithm that plugs into the VoxelPlay chunkgenerator code to provide town areas based on a combination of the building schematics from the build system and the town population and culture characteristics. The code is extremely WIP and has a number of bugs in it that require fixing in order for the feature to really be a powerful gameplay and storytelling mechanic.
Right after I found these issues I wanted to continue writing more code to visualise the buildings through the lens of an additional 2D layer in the map, similar to old school top down JRPGs. Before I knew it I was about to take the red pill and burrow into that old development rabbit hole once more. So at this point I wisely stopped, switched focus back to multiplayer and left the system to stagnate a little whilst I finished off the initial offering for the already overdue multiplayer 0.0.7 update.
For the time being, I have tagged this post as “part 1”. Below is a quick preview of the system as it stands. Each orange 3 wall point in the “plus” sign represents a 1×1 building with a door in a 3×3 foundation of cleared earth. Each 1×1 building is rotated about a single central road tile to prove the building rotation doesn’t interfere with building entrances.
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