So, how did day 1 of coding for the challenge go?

For most parts, it went well. I managed to get most of the map generation out of the way, and while I am not completely happy with it as of right now, I think that it is a good start that should enable me to get some idea of how the gameplay works once I have it in there.

Water, trees and building with no entrance.

I decided to go with a map of 500 by 500 tiles, wich makes for quite a big map, but one that you should still be able to explore if not completely, at least well enough. I will have to determine the relationship between the size of the map and time – after all, you only have three days to emerge victorious – but that will happen when I can actually playtest the game. It may be that the map is too big for creating interesting gameplay too, so everything at this point is up for change.

From the technical part, I based myself on this article but simplified : The perlin noise I generated was not fractal, so the level of detail was way lower. That is one of the things I want to revisit in the world generation, given I have enough time. Right now, the islands are really blocky, their shape is as uninteresting as can be. While I do not want to take height into account, having a ‘strange’ shape should make for more interesting subsequent games.

I am also not sure on the look I want the game to have. I really want to differentiate between nighttime and daytime, but how exactly… I do not want to spend too much time on graphics though, I would much rather devote more time to the actual map generation or to the polishing of the gameplay. Yesterday I tried both using only characters (as above), or background colors (as below).

The map with background colors for the tiles.

The main ‘issue’ with the current map generation is that it takes a whole lot of time to create the island. I would like to adress that.

But apart from working on the map generation, I think I managed to do a good amount of things ‘in the backend’ : the map scrolls inside a limited viewport leaving space for the message log and the rest of the UI, for instance. How these will pay off remains to be seen, but as of now I feel I have a good grip on things.

My next step is to throw the player into the world. That means field of view, checking for passable/unpassable terrain, and maybe adding the various bars in the right sidebar.

If possible, I would also want to take an hour to use a file-based description of terrain tiles and objects in preparation for day 3, which should be devoted to combat mechanics. Stay tuned!