Frozen Fractal : Development blog

Honestly, I’ve been looking forward to this for so long.

In the previous post, I implemented a pretty daytime sky.

Around The World will be played from a third-person chase camera, so most of the time, about half the screen will be filled with sky.

I previously blogged about how I’m modelling and rendering water waves in the game, but that was in the previous incarnation on a sphere.

Exactly one year ago this Valentine’s Day, I started development on Around The World.

Even though the in-game world is fairly small compared to Earth, I want it to feel big.

In the previous post, I determined what kind of vegetation should grow where in my procedurally generated world.

I should be working on gameplay, but I got tired of looking at drab grey terrain, so I decided to beautify it first by adding some vegetation.

In the previous post, I promised to start placing some ports in our procedurally generated world.

Now that we have a plausible looking height map for the entire world, it’s time to zoom in and see what the terrain looks like up close.

As I mentioned last time, I’m currently working on a full rewrite of the game, with a focus on building a solid technical foundation first.

I’ve done something that common wisdom in software development says you should never ever do: I started over.

In a game focused on exploration, we need to have a way to decide what the player can and cannot see.

Work on the game has been slow due to lack of time, but worse, I’ve let it drift off in the wrong direction.

The first real money I ever made from game development was on Android.

I’m having a bit of an “off” day today, so let’s do something fun, even if it’s rather low priority for the game: generating foreign languages.

Maps will be an important part of the game.

The code repository in which I’m developing Around The World is called aroundtheworld4.

All else being equal, I prefer games (and books, and movies) to be realistic, rather than making things up on the spot.

I’ve been investing a lot of effort in the generation of plausible land.