Last time I made a post like this, I announced online multiplayer was removed from my plans. Might happen some day but it's not core to the game.
Today I am announcing an even bigger change of plans.
The Forged Kingdoms is now a singular prebuilt world. It plays like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, etc. instead of playing like Civilization or Minecraft. Procedural generation is still a huge element of the game but it's no longer used to regenerate worlds.
Why am I making this change?
Today I am announcing an even bigger change of plans.
The Forged Kingdoms is now a singular prebuilt world. It plays like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, etc. instead of playing like Civilization or Minecraft. Procedural generation is still a huge element of the game but it's no longer used to regenerate worlds.
Why am I making this change?
- A singular world is better for players in my opinion because everyone can share in the experience. It brings the community together while also highlighting the "butterfly effect" caused by different player choices. For months I have been planning on having a default world for this reason.
- The world is thousands of times larger than most games and is incredibly varied. In practice regenerated worlds rearranged things more than they offered new opportunities. I can still give players a similar experience by letting them start with custom backgrounds in custom locations. Might need a cheatcode to unlock.
- Next gen systems have less RAM than I expected and instead have incredible SSDs. The majority of things in the world can be changed by player actions but many things cannot, such as plant and animal species. I can pregenerate region specific species and load them from the SSD as needed, freeing up RAM for other things. Players can still relocate species or cause them to go extinct, but they will not be regularly evolving new ones during the course of the game. I can also save a lot of other things to the SSD and record only changes in RAM.
- "Human in the loop" procedural generation can be used for the initial state of the world. As the developer I can direct the process and make sure the results are extremely high quality, similar to how almost every game currently uses procedural generation during development.
