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Posts tagged “Around The World”
Around The World, Part 23: Hydraulic erosion
Fri, 6 Jun 2025 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
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. But because much of that is boring work, I allowed myself a fun side quest: hydraulic erosion.
Around The World, Part 22: Dropping the ball
Mon, 12 May 2025 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
I’ve done something that common wisdom in software development says you should never ever do: I started over. Let me explain why. This might get a bit technical…
Around The World, Part 21: Visibility
Tue, 4 Feb 2025 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
In a game focused on exploration, we need to have a way to decide what the player can and cannot see. With a first-person or third-person 3D view, visibility comes for free: anything below the horizon, and anything behind something else, is not visible. With a top-down perspective, we need to do some more work.
Around The World, Part 20: Two steps forward, one step back
Wed, 25 Dec 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
Work on the game has been slow due to lack of time, but worse, I’ve let it drift off in the wrong direction. I need to be more careful about scope creep. But first, let’s talk about the progress that I am happy about.
Around The World, Part 19: Constructing languages
Fri, 9 Aug 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
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.
Around The World, Part 18: Charting the seas
Wed, 24 Jul 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
Maps will be an important part of the game. Let’s take a look at how we can draw those!
Around The World, Part 17: World generation in the prototype
Thu, 27 Jun 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
The code repository in which I’m developing Around The World is called aroundtheworld4. That might make you wonder: what happened to the first three? Today, let’s take a look at aroundtheworld2.
Around The World, Part 16: A matter of scale
Tue, 18 Jun 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
All else being equal, I prefer games (and books, and movies) to be realistic, rather than making things up on the spot. But of course, all else is rarely equal. Today, I’ll be taking away some of the realism of my procedural world generator to accommodate gameplay.
Around The World, Part 15: Making waves
Fri, 31 May 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
I’ve been investing a lot of effort in the generation of plausible land. But the game is all about sailing, so most of the screen will be filled with water, not land. It’s time to take that smooth blue plane that served as the sea, and make it look better!
Around The World, Part 14: Floating the origin
Thu, 11 Apr 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World, Godot
In the previous post, we got to see our generated world at close range. This revealed some precision problems that I knew I’d need to deal with eventually, but had been putting off for a rainy day. Now I could ignore them no longer.
Around The World, Part 13: Zooming in
Mon, 25 Mar 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
As mentioned in the previous post, the player will never see our procedurally generated world all at a glance. They’ll be much closer to it, and seeing only a small part at any given time. Let’s see how we can go from coarse, global world maps to something that will actually look good at close range!
Around The World, Part 12: 2D or not 2D
Tue, 19 Mar 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Design, Around the World
So far, I’ve been talking about generating a world at a very large scale for the game. But the aim of the game is exploration, so the player will rarely, if ever, get to see the entire planet at once. Which raises the question: what will the player see?
Around The World, Part 11: Everything is harder on a sphere
Mon, 8 Jan 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
I didn’t have time during the holidays to implement any new features, so enjoy this filler post that I prepared earlier! In the very first post in this series, I wrote:
The prototype took place on a rectangular map, with the left side wrapping around to the right to form a cylinder. […] Many games do this and get away with it, but because I’m a perfectionist, I want my game to take place on an actual sphere.
Today I’m going to write up in some detail why spheres are harder to work with.
Around The World, Part 10: Fixing the climate
Tue, 2 Jan 2024 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
The previous post ended with a cliffhanger: how would we get rid of all the arid zones (pink) in the Köppen climate classification? An alternating game of spot-the-difference and whack-a-mole ensues.
Around The World, Part 9: Climate
Fri, 29 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
Last time, I described how I’m generating different weather patterns based on the season. That data is already useful for the game, to decide the weather at one particular place and time, but it’s also essential when figuring out the local biome, which is what we’re doing today.
Around The World, Part 8: Seasons
Tue, 19 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
In the last post, we developed some basic but useful algorithms to generate temperature and rain maps for an entire year. However, these assumed that the weather is constant throughout the year. As any citizen of Earth knows, that is not quite true, so let’s fix it!
Around The World, Part 7: Temperature and rain
Fri, 15 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
We now have prevailing wind patterns going, so it’s time to turn to the other two important parameters that define the weather: rain and temperature.
Around The World, Part 6: Wind hacks
Tue, 12 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
In the previous post, I described a failed attempt to solve this problem of converging winds:
Around The World, Part 5: Wind pressure
Fri, 8 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
Last time, we got some basic wind patterns going. However, there’s still a problem.
Around The World, Part 4: Basic wind
Mon, 4 Dec 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
Now that we have a finalized height map of our generated world, it’s time to put something on the surface. But to know what to put there – forest, desert, grassland, ice – we have to know something about the local conditions. And to know those, we have to know about wind patterns.
Around The World, Part 3: Hotspots and erosion
Mon, 20 Nov 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
In the last post, we added the effects caused by tectonic plates:
Around The World, Part 2: Plate tectonics
Mon, 13 Nov 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
In the previous post, we tackled generation of continent shapes using Voronoi cells and set some base heights using curves and simplex noise:
Around The World, Part 1: Continents
Thu, 2 Nov 2023 by Thomas ten Cate · Comments
Game Development, Around the World
There’s this game concept that has been on my mind for years, and I can’t seem to let it go. You step into the wet, salt-crusted shoes of the naval explorers of old: Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Cook. Most of the world is still a big unknown question mark: here be dragons. There are no satellites, no GPS, not even maps. The only way to find out what’s out there is to actually go there – which is a risky venture. Your navigational tools: a compass, the sun, moon and stars, and any information you might learn from the locals along the way. Your goal: to find a route around the world and end up where you started.
