Ever noticed that most games don’t have randomized maps? There’s a reason for that. Doing them very well is really hard.
Probably if I had to do it over again, I’d be tempted to not have random maps. But as a gamer, I just find random maps to be too important not to have. It’s a big issue with me that I feel like each game is a new game.
Since Stardock is closed for the 4th of July holiday, a few of us are just working on stuff that we enjoy.
My long time friend, Paul Boyer, who is in charge of art, is making cool new stuff for the Fallen this holiday.
As for me, I’m playing around with the random map generation which is admittedly in pretty rough shape (i.e. a LOT of hard coded values in there). For instance, in your build, there are 40 goodie huts on a map. No more. No less. Regardless of size. The bigger the map, the more boring it will get.
Of course, have too many goodie huts and it robs the game of challenge. Too few and the game feels boring.
Same for resources. Starting location is just too important to live to chance. The area around a given player’s start MUST have some useful, balanced stuff around it (and in beta 3, there just isn’t).
The map generation and starting setup are things that I suspect I’ll be playing with for the next couple of years. It’s just something that can just keep getting better and more interesting over time.
