Sculpting a World, Part One
Over the last three days I’ve been working on an early prototype of the procedural island generation system for the Vertebrae project. It’s currently still very much a work in progress and focuses more on the simple aspects of land mass generation, future versions will expand on this early work, incorporating a much larger element of actual simulation, such as erosion, rainfall, humidity and so forth. With all this data I should hopefully be able to more accurately model a living world, with well placed biomes, aiding the intelligent placement of fauna and flora within the world.
And so it begins.
With this diary I am intending to document the progress I make in developing Vertebrae, my final year project at the University of Plymouth. The project will deliver a game, it’s engine and a suite of tools for content editing. The gameplay will revolve around the advancement of a character in a fairly traditional RPG manner, combat, levelling, item management and questing. The engine will use procedural world generation to create an entirely unique tile based world on each play-through, though unlike many tile systems, the terrain will be contoured to a certain extent.