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Devlog 11

The world, built from its map

The world map from the last two devlogs is now how the game builds its world. Press Play and the whole map is made first, with "Making the world..." on screen while it happens. Then the ground near you loads from that map as you move.

A whole world

  • It wraps east to west with no seam: walk long enough one way and you come back from the other. North and south grow cold and harsh.
  • Water sits at its own height in every place, so rivers step down toward the sea, and there are lakes, swamp puddles and frozen sea.
  • Every region on the map is its own kind of land, with bare rock, swamp and ice fields new among them.
  • Towns are spread across the map, joined by paved roads, with plank bridges where a road crosses water.
  • Press M for the map: the whole world, with a marker where you stand.
The map screen: green land with snowy peaks, blue rivers and lakes, brown roads joining small town markers, the sea to the south, and a white marker showing where the player stands.

Fixed on the way

Far from the middle of the world, the light on everything turned to grain. Numbers in a computer get less exact the bigger they are, and the lighting was worked out from the world's centre. It is now worked out from the camera, so the light stays clean wherever you are.

The sea floor also poked up through shallow water in regular streaks. That is fixed too.

Before the fix: a shallow sea seen from above, rows of sandy sea floor poking up through the water in regular streaks, a beach and trees along the left.

Still rough

Up close, the land is too flat and too wide: the shape of the world is there, but walking it feels like one long plain. So the old rolling hills are coming back as a layer on top of the map. Some square stone walls still stand by mountain lakes, too.

A wide, flat grassland under a pale sky, with scattered oaks, sakura trees and boulders, and long faint terrace lines running across it. Seen from above, oaks growing on a raised square of grass, its straight grey stone walls dropping to snow on every side.