Thursday, January 20, 2011

New Blog

http://eraproduction.tumblr.com/

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Game mechanics and coding today



For the game mechanics I have been having some ideas to involve the towns in a more interesting way. Through the players investment in a town, they can improve its quality though the construction of objects around it such as walls, roads, granaries, or universities, which in turn makes the town more profitable to the player. This relationship of town to player is fundamentally at this games core, because in order for a player to expand at their own settlement, these kind of interactions must take place, and since multiple players can invest in a single town, this should spur up some conflict for control, as well as some team work in order to improve its quality.



Just some Ideas as to how I will draw mountain ranges, something which will overlay on top of the map, the squares act as a center point for the map symbols.

And although its subtle, the nodes are now modified by the sun, yes the sun.

There is a slight brightness difference in the nodes to represent cooler or hotter climates, further away from the equator.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Movable Map







The top image is some experimentation with the mouse moving the map around.

I replaced an array of squares with a placeholder image, and setup bounderies as to where
the map can be dragged. Left click dragges, right click zooms, the squares are an experiement
in a processing object called PGraphics. This is all good news, I was worried about how to display flat objects,
layers, and things. But with some of these objects, I can load a screen seperatly, and reference that screen later.

So in terms of program speed and orginization, interface options can be simplified and loaded when the program might be
doing less intensive work, then referenced when needed. It simplifies the drawing process, something which
will become more apparent in due time.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Custom Classes



First experiments with custom classes and some working OOp

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Map Editor Finished...for now

I have recently finished the map editor,

I want to leave it as it is for now, however I have always wanted to add temperature gradients and perhaps fertility modifiers based on wind direction and represented through saturation. I am already starting to imagine the process for this, however it is imperative that I move onwards to the actual game structure.







Friday, October 22, 2010

Mountains

So, these are the first 3 mountain generations, I am happy that the system is able to create interesting and dynamic combinations. I am starting to imagine how the mountains (a landform which takes longer to move across and obscures vision, can become almost like sticky glue or high walls. They create corridors and valleys which I think will prove to influence someone's strategy greatly.

The difference between these pictures and the mountain ones below, is that these are aware of their quantity, I want the system to divvy up the land nodes (anything that isn't blue) into around 4 equal parts, for each land node. Hybrid nodes count as .5 of a count for each.







By the way, Orange is half coastal, half mountain.
when its against the water it becomes a cliff, when a river runs through a mountain chain, it becomes a canyon. Hybrid nodes are are great battlefields because potentially both forces can be good at fighting on them.

The difference between canyon and cliffis not rule based, however If I need to source it for a scene, it would be good to know the difference, the hue is 1 point off.