World map experiments

This week I came up with a lot of new ideas for the worldbuilding, plot and game design, but I'll be focusing on just one aspect in this post and save the rest for later. This one is about the size and shape of the entire game world, which is something I worked on during the week. It comes with a few images too!

I've previously talked about some of the challenges with having a huge game world and how the new terrain system solves most of the terrain related problems, so now the question is rather how large you want it to be and if it is possible to make the game work at that scale. It's important for it to be large because you can fly very fast and see very far from the skies, but also for the scale of conflicts to make sense. My ideal world map would have the same kind of features as what you often see in drawn fantasy maps with large continents, mountain ranges and oceans. I've been testing sizes all the way up to 1+ million square kilometers, which is around 4-5x the size of real life Great Britain. At this scale those kinds of features are very prominent, but you need to rely on procedural generation for the majority of the world. Procedural generation means that you are creating the world using math while the game is running, so you don't need to store anything on disk. It's how No Man's Sky can have an entire universe of planets for example. This usually doesn't look very good and can get repetitive, but I managed to make something that actually starts to resemble real continents with a very high level of detail, so it might be viable to use as the base layer for the world with some more work. Another thing about procedural generation is that you can create as many variations as you want without any additional work, so let's create a few worlds and see what they look like!

Example A

This is my favorite so far, mostly because of the island in the middle. I'm considering making the world have the north pole in the middle of the map (similar to the flat earth model heh), which would make the center island the place where dragons originate from.

Example B

Here's one where most of the landmass belongs to a single large continent.

Example C

This last example has some interesting shapes going on.

Alright that looks pretty cool, but how big are the worlds? In this case, all three examples are a bit over a million square kilometers each. That doesn't tell you much until you have a point of reference, so let's pick this little island and see what it looks like when flying.

As you can see even this little speck is a pretty big island up close, so that should give you some sense of scale. This world definitely fits the desired size for having oceans and continents, but this is just one part of the equation and its possible it will need to be down scaled later. To fill the world with enough settlements and other points of interest that make it come alive is different beast that we'll tackle another day.