The Break

I’ve been on a break from further development for the past month. Various reasons for the break including just being busy, freelance design work and playing too much Civ 5, DOTA2, Card Hunter and Android:Netrunner.

The World

One thing that added to the stall was trying to come up with the right way to proceed with the World Generation. The current way the world is generated in Nano is not very apparent to the player. But here is a summary of how it works:

1. A player enters an x/y location, either through moving to that location or their initial spawning (which places them at 0x 0y.
2. The game checks to see if a terrain piece has already been set to that location.
3. If there IS a terrain piece saved to the player’s location, then that terrain piece is displayed to the player.
4. If there is NOT a terrain piece saved, the game randomly rolls to see which terrain piece to use out of all terrain pieces in the database. Then that terrain is saved to that location and any player entering that location will find that terrain piece.

While this was very easy to implement, it also is very rudimentary and does not allow for the inclusion of Biomes. Ideally, if a player was in a Thick Forest terrain, then they moved 1 position they would still be in a Forest biome and hence get another forest type terrain piece generated for them. This would continue until the player came to a transition piece which the game would place semi-randomly (it would take into account the adjacent terrain which would affect the probability of the player’s location being generated as a transition piece). Once a transition piece has been placed, adjacent, undefined locations could be from any other biome.

Basically, this would make it so a player wouldn’t be in a forest one second, a mountain the next and then a desert after that. Hopefully, implementing biomes would make the world of Nano seem more realistic, with various Forest terrains adjacent to each other, as with all other biomes.

This however is much harder to implement and there are many ways to achieve the desired effect. I looked into a variety of procedural generation techniques which use height maps or Perlin Noise. But these methods seemed a bit too complex for my needs and it would also mean more terrain would be generated than I needed, if I was to generate terrain only on a character’s movement.

Another option was to simply create the game world manually. This has the benefits of being easy (no programming needed) but would limit the size of the world and would make the world less dynamic.

So, my current plan is to do something similar to transition piece idea, mentioned above. I’ve yet to begin implementing it but I think that will achieve my goal best without being overly complicated.

The Art

I’ve got new card art! Ashley Kuros has been a friend of mine for a long time and she is a talented artist. She has been nice enough to offer her help with the art needed for my game! So far she’s provided a bunch of pieces to be used with the various cards you can find in Nano. Below are a few of the pieces provided by Ashley already implemented in Nano and I hope she’ll continue providing more!