New Release Timeline
The recent Next Fest has been absolutely wild. Thank you everyone who has tried the game out and given your feedback. A lot of you are excited for what's to come and given some amazing feedback and feature requests, and I realize more and more that I want much more to be in the game before it can be release ready. The bar is incredibly high for an Early Access release of a game like this, and I want to make sure Blight doesn't disappoint.
Getting everything in by the end of this year will be a bit too aggressive of a goal, so I want to push the Early Access release back to the first half of 2022. Thanks for your understanding!
World Generation Updates
Procedural generation is a major aspect of Blight. The goal is to have some of the most realistic and beautiful worlds generated in a game like this ever.
Been working diligently on a bunch of world generation updates and wanted to post some progress shots about what's coming soon in the next big update.
Region Map
The current playable alpha release/demo has a basically infinitely generated world, but the game initially populates a specific large area with procedurally generated special features like lakes, rivers and a sea. A "region map" is then generated for the area that you can access:
Roads & village locations
The world feels a bit empty though, so been working a lot on populating it with realistic village generation and roads connecting all of them:
A very customized A* approach is used for the rivers and roads, to make sure they avoid harsh elevation changes as much as possible, have the roads avoid crossing the rivers too much, and keep river paths randomized enough to look fairly natural.
How things actually look ingame
The region map shows all the pre-generated locations as basically one big tile-map. Each of these tiles corresponds to a chunk ingame, and so when you venture to areas with roads, rivers, and villages, the game uses this tile map as a sort of metadata lookup to figure out how to generate the terrain, which objects to place, etc,
Here you can see a road intersecting with a river and generating a simple ford crossing (with generated bridges to come later)
Here is a village location. There is a central chunk designated as the village root, and a random expansion to chunks in various directions up to a certain limit.
Excited to get a playable version of all these features out soon!
Thanks for reading!