Summary:
In which techniques for terrain are developed; a new tool helps with mountains; and the question of what the player does on planets is approached.
Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, a new planetary surface, showing in particular some progress, I hope, on the depiction of mountains:
And indeed, it was the generation of such planetary surfaces, and especially of mountains, that primarily took up the work of the week just past:
I mentioned last week, I believe, that I was finding it quite a challenge to produce the terrain maps that underlie the depiction of planets in Moons in Crystal. And indeed, that challenge continued in the week just past!
At the broad scale, the problem, in short, was that neither hand-painted approaches nor pseudo-random approaches quite worked: the former lacked the intricate detail that such terrains seemed to call for, while the latter were detailed, but lacked a means for me to control what appeared where.
Thankfully, I found a solution in combining the two: I found that I could hand-paint a base structure (with some blurring and tweaking), and then use a pseudo-random "cloud" texture to add detail to it.
But mountains remained a problem.
To that end, I built a tool intended to allow me to design mountain ranges, and to render their heightmaps (more or less) as I desired.
(I did try including the design of other parts of the terrain into the tool, but ended up abandoning that.)
And I do think that it helped! It was slow going--the rendering took quite a bit of time, meaning that iteration took quite a bit of time--but I think that it largely worked in the end.
(Albeit that some tweaking may still be called for.)
During this process, I gave further thought to the question of what the player might do on these planets--and I think that I may have at least the start to an answer:
Now, the player's goal on a given planet is to consult with a powerful spirit on the central danger that prompts the events of the game.
My thinking, then, is that the player won't start off knowing where these spirits are located. Instead, they will find clues scattered across a given planet's solar system, which then lead to the discovery of the relevant location on said planet.
This, I hope, both provides something to do on the planet, and an additional reason for the exploration of the moons.
However, there are still questions--in particular, that of quite how this plays out:
A simple approach might be that of a "chain of clues": the player finds one clue, which points to another, which in turn points to yet another, and so on.
But this, I fear, can be somewhat frustrating: no clue but the last provides much reward, and progress is not all that apparent.
A more-interesting approach might be to have the player gather clues, and then use all of them to identify the relevant location.
And this I do like--but I'm not yet sure of how it might be approached in this specific game; of how it make it fit with the rest of the gameplay.
More thinking is called for, I daresay!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
