The goal of this Dev Diary is to discuss considerations we make when designing the map and to update you on the major map rework underway!

In this Dev Diary, Marc will lead you through a few examples that highlight general design considerations we make when creating provinces. Then, you will meet two of Gilded Destiny's content designers! Basten will discuss the importance of consulting historical sources and various aspects of placing cities and creating countries. Josh will then discuss the methodology of placing terrain features. Finally, Marc will discuss the major map rework, including performance optimizations and will highlight several aesthetic and game mechanics improvements planned.

You can find the full script for the Dev Diary below.

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Let us know if you have any questions or feedback over on Discord. And be sure to wishlist us to stay up to date!

Join our Discord community today!
https://discord.gg/3d77T9gxDF


Speaking of Discord, we have started rolling the Discord roles to our Kickstarter backers! If you have not yet completed the Kickstarter survey we sent out, please do so. If you have filled it out, and are not yet in our Discord server, join and say hello in the main channel to let us know you're there to claim your role!

Our Kickstarter officially ended in April, and brought in a total of £31,974 GBP, which is 159% of our goal! We offer the most gilded appreciation to all of our backers and our community. Your support, positive feedback and encouragement, and our growing vibrant community of industrialists motivates more than ever to make Gilded Destiny the most moddable, immersive, fun, and grandest GSG out there.

You can access the survey on the Kickstarter website:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gildeddestiny/gilded-destiny-a-grand-strategy-game?ref=bjurrh


Finally, if you are interested in what we do and want to join us but do not see a relevant job, send us your resume at jobs@aquilainteractive.io!

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Salutations Industrialists,

It's Marc again. I'm a Producer of Gilded Destiny, and work on a bit of everything too. As you probably have noticed, we have shared our Alpha Roadmap, where we highlighted several features and content that we plan to integrate over the next few months. We have received a lot of feedback on our maps, and the recently completed provincial borders. We want to first remind you that our borders are still a work in progress. While we have finished the first pass at provincial borders, they are by no means final. Given the ease of editing provinces, we will likely continue tweaking these... For now, they are largely based on historical borders, taking into account certain considerations and artistic freedom for the purposes of consistency and integrity of the gameplay throughout the entire Gilded Destiny timeline, optimization, aesthetics, and available data. Finally, if you see something you love (or hate) please let us know in the comments or over on our Discord, where we take note of all feedback from our community.

Speaking of Discord, we have started rolling our roles to our Kickstarter backers! If you have not yet completed the Kickstarter survey we sent out, please do so. If you have filled it out, and are not yet in our Discord server (many of you, ahem), join and say hello in the main channel to let us know you're there to claim your role!

Finally, in this Dev Diary, I am happy to introduce two of our content designers, Basten and Josh, who you will meet shortly.


Well, as you may have guessed, today's topic is related to the choices we make when designing the maps, and updating you on our major map rework to improve performance and aesthetics.

On the content design side, our main task now with the map will be adding terrain features to the map. This includes everything from mountain ranges, elevation, rivers, and lakes to each tile. But, more on that in a moment. As we add features and fully implement systems into the game, we will reassess the map. Our primary goal for the map is to ensure that the game is fun to play, allows plenty of desired alt-history scenarios, and reflects the world of the 19th century. As mentioned before, we take a certain amount of creative freedom when designing the map and its borders, in anticipation of gameplay and optimization. Many of you have already made suggestions for improvement—which we welcome and encourage.

Let's take a look at North America to illustrate some of these considerations.


To start us off, I'll show you California, and how I divided it. We actually have two Californians on our team. I'm from Southern California and consider anything north of Los Angeles to be "Northern California." Meanwhile, Kenneth is from Northern California and considers anything south of the Bay Area to be Southern California. As I was the one undertaking this task, I realized that I could make Southern California larger (while letting Kenneth think I was listening to him) and draw the border a bit more North. In the end, we have two California's roughly equal in size. Dividing California further, as it is a very large "province," was a consideration, allowing some interesting alt-history scenarios. However, we decided on just two for several reasons, which we'll highlight now.

First, in Canada, British North American provinces did not join the Dominion of Canada all at once during the process of Canadian Confederation beginning mid-game in July 1, 1867. So when drawing provinces, I needed to consider a few alternate scenarios. First, modeling all of the border fluctuations in central Canada (the border of Ontario, Manitoba, and the District of Keewatin) would be unrealistic, as the goal is ultimately to create provinces that make sense for gameplay throughout the timeline—since provincial borders are fixed throughout the game (unless you mod them in the editor of course). To model each expansion of Canadian territory, I divided some borders into—let's call it the "average"—of what happened. For example, if we take a look at "Manitoba," which was one of the first areas to pledge allegiance to the federal Dominion of Canada Canada, it is a small square, that eventually expands into a larger "Greater Manitoba"—eventually becoming the full-size Manitoba (in 1912) we are familiar with today, by assuming parts of the District of Keewatin and the Northwest Territories.

[Show modifications to map in Editor]

Considerations such as these, were made by balancing historical realism with what we think would be fun during gameplay—in this case, the territorial expansion of Canada, giving access to more population, land, and logistics possibilities. All that being said, let's take a look at "Greater Manitoba" here. As I mentioned, we need to take gameplay into consideration, and making a mild alteration here could result in more natural gameplay, "should" Greater Winnipeg (a border province) ever be conquered by the United States—thus creating a Manitoba exclave, which would not be ideal. So, I'm making an edit here, to remove the Eastern Panhandle of Greater Manitoba by expanding Manitoba, Upper Ontario, and East Keewatin. Now we have a smoother and cleaner border, even if it slightly differs from real-world maps.

Now let's turn to Mexico for another aspect of making considerations based on gameplay.

In Mexico, albeit with some reluctance, we combined several of the smaller provinces in central Mexico, due to optimization and performance considerations. In the end, Mexico has many more provinces than Canada and is a much smaller country. Furthermore, the provinces combined were smaller internal provinces well within Mexican territory, so would be unlikely to be on the frontlines of any national border changes. With all of this in mind, several states were consolidated into their historical predecessor. Contrary to Canada, Mexico did not experience territorial expansion (rather a reduction), and new states were carved out of older ones. Provincial borders were not usually moved, bur rather stayed intact, with new provinces (or states) created within them.

Another quick example is the US-Mexico border, at the start of the game. The border of the Mexican Empire in the 1820s roughly coincided with what would be future US "State" borders, as shown here. However, the Mexican Empire was in fact slightly larger than this, which would require redrawing many borders, adding new rather small provinces into the game. As adding these new provinces would likely impact performance at an unacceptable level, and giving these small border territories to the Mexican Empire would not result in any real measurable gain strategically, we decided to leave the borders at the US State borders (which is how they are for most of the game). Of course, this would impact you, if you want to play as the Lone Star Republic, as you won't have that nice long, swooping panhandle. However, I'll just quickly say that the game is highly moddable with the built-in editor and you can easily add in these new borders, like I did just now.

[showing Map in Editor of Texas and US with accurate borders and small provinces.]
Perhaps in the future we will be comfortable including many more smaller provinces, at which time, we'll happily include more Californias, more US-Mexico border provinces, more Mexican states, and more Texas, more micro-nations in Europe, and so on.

Now, we have the first guest for this Dev Diary. I'd like to introduce you to Basten, who is a Content Designer for Gilded Destiny.


Hi everyone, my name is Basten, and I am one of the content designers for Aquila Interactive. I joined the company in early January, and I am now mainly working on the map redesign work, including provinces, cities, and playable nations. I’ve already finished my province drafts for Eastern and Southeastern Asia, Australia, Africa, the Caribbeans, and South America, and I’ve done most of the cities except for South America, Mexico, Europe, and Southern Asia. I’m glad that I am offered this opportunity to tell you how our team designs the map of this game.

To reiterate what you just heard from Marc—For a historical game, it is important to have the map designed and portrayed properly. This is not just about historical accuracy, but also the provinces, countries, and cities included must be relevant to the playable content in our game. When making national borders and creating countries and provinces, the political divisions in 1822 at the start of the game are not the only factor that matters. What happened since 1822 should also be taken into consideration—territorial expansion, border skirmishes, shifting borders, colonization, and so on. And as Marc mentioned, we often take some creative freedom in designing the map. Finally, some areas in 1822 were simply way too big or too small for our game, so we made careful modifications in these cases by separating or merging them to fit into our game system.

The selection of cities is also a difficult mission, especially for regions like Africa and South America where history wasn’t recorded in details or settlements changed significantly. Players will find some familiar cities missing in this game, but the reason for that was they were either not yet established in 1822 or they were not as important as other cities in 1822.

And here we come to the last topic, which is playable nations. Due to the capacity of our game engine, it is impossible to put all 19(th)-century nations in our game, so we carefully researched into history and eventually selected the most significant ones. For example, players will find many nations missing in Africa, and most regions there will be “uncolonized.” This is because those regions were either occupied by aboriginal tribal forces and never formed any real nation state, or local kingdoms there never had any effective resistance against the colonial powers. For more information on how Gilded Destiny will handle with regions like this, check out our Dev Diary on Colonization. However, those who fought long and determined wars against the colonizers, like Ashanti and Xhosa, were added to our game as a representation of history. Some other African nations were selected because they were powerful enough in 1822, so you can play them normally as you can do for any other playable nations. This offers you players a chance to develop into great powers in any part of the world in our game. And lastly, some specific regions, like Ethiopia, Thailand, or modern-day Nigeria, were experiencing on-going conflicts by then, so we created relevant nations there to represent history.


Thank you, Basten! Now, let's hear from our second guest, another one of our Content Designers, Josh, who will talk about how we model terrain.


Hi, I'm Josh, a Content Designer at Aquila Interactive. Previously, I've worked mostly in narrative and writing for games, working on a range of genres from first-person shooters to metroidvanias. For Gilded Destiny, I mostly work on designing and writing events for the game, as well as working on the game's map, deciding on provinces and creating the physical geography of regions which will make for a more meaningful experience for players.

When designing the terrain features for Gilded Destiny's map, we compile real-world maps of the elevation levels, mountainous regions, and rivers of each country, which are considered carefully in the design process. However, gameplay must also play a significant driving role in how we design terrain, ensuring that interesting and exciting potential scenarios are created for players through how the terrain is laid out.

When considering the elevation of our map tiles, we seek to avoid creating steep shelves - adjacent tiles where the elevation level from one to the next increases by a value more than one. In these instances, a player's army will not be able to travel onto the higher tile from the lower one. We take each level of elevation to roughly represent an increase in altitude of 330-500 meters, and the elevation level will always remain consistent across any single tile.

In some especially elevated areas, such as the Himalayas, to accurately represent their real-world height, and the rapid rate at which their altitude increases, elevation steps of greater than one would be required. Instead of seeking to portray these kinds of regions with precise adherence to reality, we instead use terrain features like mountains to create a result which is more aesthetically pleasing, as well as preventing large areas from being completely "locked-off" from exploration by players due to their steepness.

A "mountain" inhabits a single tile, although, when placing them using the editor, multiple mountains can be joined to form ranges which cluster together. When placing mountains, the intention is to create passes through which the player will be able to move their armies, providing unique strategic opportunities and challenges, such as choke points and areas which are flanked and protected by mountain ranges. These can be seen in the Western Ghats mountain range which runs down the western coast of India, mostly separating the coastal area from the main inland areas, with several key points through which pathways between the two are possible.

The same core considerations are present with rivers, which are placed in such a way that players will be invited to carefully consider where to cross their armies, as well as build bridges to facilitate ease of movement and trade. In Gilded Destiny, rivers can be of varying widths, and can join and flow into one another, although the width of a river never exceeds that of a single tile.

These terrain features are intended to give players unique geographical challenges to overcome, so that they will need to stop and think about their strategic needs, and how best to meet them with the landscape in mind.


Thanks, Josh!

And, this brings us to the major overhaul of Gilded Destiny's map. Our Technical Artists and Programmers are currently designing and implementing a Map Rework, aimed at improving performance, improving pathfinding for logistics and military, and making the map more beautiful.

Here are some of the optimizations the team has accomplished in the new build.

Initial loading times to initialize the map have been optimized for the game and the editor, resulting in a reduction from 35 seconds down to 5 seconds. The loading time for the map in the editor has been reduced from 75 seconds to 10 seconds—a welcome change for us doing content design too! I should note that these loading times are for the map alone, not including game logic and content. This has all been accomplished alongside an improvement in processing efficiency—with a reduction in memory usage from 4GB to 1.4GB and VRAM from 3.3GB down to 2.6GB.

These optimizations have led to visible improvements in the game. As you can see here, this is a capture from our old build before the map rework. You can see the frame rate hovering around 150 fps, ranging from about 120 up to 170 at times. Now, I'd like to present the new map to you. Keep in mind, while it is already visibly different, we have many more updates to the terrain features in store. You'll immediately notice coastlines are smoother, but more on these features in a moment. You might have noticed that the frame rate has been much higher around 200 fps, ranging from about 150 up to 230 or more at times. In fact, the average frame rate has been improved from 50fps to 150fps. The theoretical maximum frame rate has been increased from 150fps to 350. And the minimum frame rate has been improved from 30 to 100fps. It is of course important to mention the specs of the PC these numbers are based on. The PC used for testing is running an Intel i5-12400F 2.5GHz, a GeForce RTX 3060, and it has 32GB of RAM.

At this point, many of you will be of course wondering if we will be reducing our expected minimum system requirements for Gilded Destiny. The quick answer is yes. However, we still expect that there will be improvements in optimization in maps, game logic, and rendering of visuals. So, we will let you know soon what those will be, closer to the release of the Alpha.

Aesthetically, as you may have noticed, there will be improvements to coastlines, rivers, mountains, hills, and snowcapped mountains—making coastlines appear smoother and other features more natural, while making them all more visually pleasing as well! With the new build we plan to allow for canals to be constructed too.

Finally, our Technical Artists and programmers are working to implement new naval logic to allow the formation of fleets. Also, the programming team will be creating the logic to support visuals for naval combat and fleet movement through straits—at this point, however, we are not sure when or if these visuals will be created. But, for example, if modders wanted to take advantage of this logic, it will be available. In addition, stay tuned for several other aesthetic improvements that will added into the game.

Well, that's it for today's Dev Diary. If what I mentioned in the Dev Diary was interesting to you, and you have experience with historical research, mapping, writing, game design, and have an interest in figuring out the "why" of history, we are always looking for new talent to join our team.

Thank you for watching.

Lastly, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and, if you have not done so already, add Gilded Destiny to your Steam wishlist. Until our paths converge once more, we bid thee farewell!

May your destiny be a gilded one.



Be sure to listen closely to the backing tracks in all our videos—they are the pieces you will come to hear in the game, composed by John Skoog. Also, the solo clarinet on this track was performed by yours truly, Marc.

Listen to some of John Skoog's other work on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3PGd3lmURa72oFasqK3N7N?si=nDl4DUTRQGKKLaDtGcHBJw
John Skoog Music: https://www.johnskoogmusic.com/