World Generation (First Devblog Post)
Well, I suppose it’s time to start working on a legitimately detailed website and devblog. To be honest, I have a terrible track record when it comes to maintaining these kinds of endeavors, but I think many other game/software devs could say the same, so I just need to keep at it over time.
Over the past year or so I have been working on a project which I was initially titling “Cult: Resurrection”, in honor of my long-ago-failed attempt at creating a procedurally generated masterpiece. After spending enough time working on this, however, I don’t think that’s really appropriate. While I learned a lot during the time I spent working on Cult: AotOO and the failures I experienced as a result of my naiveté, I don’t think this is a true spiritual successor to what I wanted to do in that game. I still regard procedural generation as an incredible feat of modern computing, but I don’t really hold it in the same regard I did ten or fifteen years ago; there’s a reason many procedurally generated attempts at universe-building are regarded as “soulless”.
I’m not sure I have that same kind of special magic that strategy/base-building legends like Tarn Adams or Tynan Sylvester do when it comes to creating a procedurally generated world and glossing over the details just enough to make the emergent storytelling really feel special and unique in spite of that. I’d rather focus on storytelling and characters, and unique, handcrafted locations that will help to stave off that feeling of a world not really feeling “unique”. I think that Caves of Qud is my favorite modern game that demonstrates how to do this, offering a truly unique gaming experience and world while still allowing a huge variety of procedurally generated stuff for the sake of adding to the replayability factor.
I’m tossing up a random image of one of the worlds generated in the current version of ItD below. I’ll plan on uploading more media to the site soon, but this seems like a reasonable place to start.
