I always wanted to be a solo developer, but I didn’t think I’d be thrust into it so suddenly. It’s been three months now. After a brief flirtation with a smaller game on itch, I returned to World Master. I’ve managed to get a steam page online. It was remarkably straightforward, but still a lot of work. Now the goal is to get the game into a playable state so I can do playtests.

World Master is currently a collection of tenuously connected elements that will make up the game. World generation works beautifully and the player is then placed on the region map. However, region generation is still incomplete. The player can move their character around the sparsely populated region map, but not much else without debug controls. The local maps and combat encounters are functional, but there is no encounter table on the region map to connect the player to them, so they are basically debug gyms cordoned off on their own for now.

Making those connections is what I am working on at the moment. Since the store page went live I’ve been fleshing out region generation and working on map streaming so the player can explore freely without hitting loading screens or needing to go to the world map and select the next region. Until last week that was the only way to get around.

The world map is 400 x 200 tiles, and each tile represents a region. The region map is where the player moves across the game world. Each region is 100 x 100, and each tile represents a 1km square. So, the game world is 40,000km around, 8km short of the Earth's circumference. The player is free to explore as long as their resources will allow. When the player crosses a region boundary the game needs to invisibly prepare the regions that they are approaching and drop the regions they are walking away from. First we check if the regions exist on disk. If they do, we can load it. If they don’t we need to generate them from scratch using the world and nearby region data.

The tricky part is that regions are generated in 2 phases. Phase 1 is done one region at a time. The first phase only needs world tile data to set the elevation map, soil and rock properties, climate data, major rivers and major roads. Phase 2 needs to work across multiple regions at once to allow features to cross regional boundaries. It would be strange if every small stream, lake, minor road, and forest was bound by invisible square borders. We also want things like the placement of towns and villages to take into account the economic activity of nearby settlements and points of interest regardless of whether they are in the same region.

Once I’ve got the human settlement placement working I can move on to placing monsters, lairs and dungeons. That will generate the data needed for encounter tables and bounty boards. It's critical to the game that monster encounters aren't random events. There will be plenty of dice rolling involved, but the encounter tables and the conditions and dispositions of what is on those tables are all deterministic. For instance, my conception of goblins is as a kind of parasite on human civilization. Goblins tend to lair near poorly defended trade routes. A single successful raid of a trade cart can feed goblins for weeks. They arm and clothe themselves with the trade goods of nearby towns. It wouldn't make sense to encounter goblins in an uninhabited desert, and well defended cities will clear out goblin lairs fairly easily. It's going to take time before I get every piece knitted together, but I can at least get monsters settling in reasonable places in time for the playtest.

The first round of playtesting will be private for my friends and family who have been helpful playtesters in the past. They always help me find the kind of glaring problems I’ve become blind to. Buttons that don't look clickable, spelling mistakes, poorly communicated mechanics. Then I’ll retreat into my cave and address their concerns. Once they are satisfied I’ll open up playtests to automatically accept anyone who applies. I look forward to having strangers play my game and getting some public feedback.

I'm hoping to open up playtests this summer and then try to get a demo up shortly after that. However, I know the gap between the playtest and the demo will be significant. The playtest is more focused on game feel and technical issues like compatibility and performance. The demo will require much more of the game's systems to be working. World Master is a big game, and I'm trying to get it into people's hands as quickly as possible. It's not really a game I can make a vertical slice of, it's more of a horizontal slice. A sampling of key systems in a working state that can provide the fun and demonstrate the promise of the completed game.

Anyways, thanks to everyone who has wishlisted the game. I'll be posting more progress reports and updating the steam page as I go along.