Immortal Realm Update: I’m not just making a game… I’m creating a world

A lot has happened over the past week is quite the understatement. The scope of the game has once again changed dramatically. Though in the direction I had originally hoped. These are all good scope changes.

So what happened?

Immortal Realm is now a much bigger game. The first decision was to generate a new landscape. The Prototype village was “ok”, but it commanded change. So I broke out Gaia and started world building. I must have gone through about 100 different landscapes, stamp combos the works to get here. Watching the current landscape generate, I knew it was the one. There was this central volcano and a flat plateau mesa off to the side. That was the spot for the village to be. but the landscape algorithm wrecked some pretty spots.

Unfettered, the landscape was saved into the main folder and named accordingly.  Texturing was the next step and that in itself became a battle. Tuesday evening and all of the 4th of July day off was spent working fighting with the texture generator. After getting the feel for the landscape and it’s textures I deleted it all and started over. A total of 10 new textures were found and added. There are 4 grass textures, several rock formations, mud and snow capped mountains. After generating all the rules for the textures everything just started to work. Let’s just say I got to know Perlin pretty well.

The textureing end result was worth keeping. So I started forging the landscape, making it mine. The Algorithms did a decent job getting the landscape started but so much more was needed. The village Mesa was formed to my vision. It fit a grand old village there that you’ll see in the Youtube video.

Then came the rivers

the RAM Auto River tool is ok. There’s no documentation, so another day was lost figuring this tool out. Splines totally rock though. After the struggle to figure it out was complete, I made splines like a boss. The river and waterfall were formed to match my landscape. It also allowed me to do other things thought impossible. Next step is to figure out why it glows to spite my environmental and weather fog.

Down comes the rain

and washed the spider out. Or something of that nature. Enviro afforded me some great weather patterns and a day/night cycle. Totally cool. This was the easiest package to deal with. It plugged in and things just worked. The only documentation needed was how to get it plugged in. Gaia actually made that possible with the click of a button. It helped with Suimono water system and some other plugins. Life was great thanks to Gaia.

What’s to expect?

Next week I’ll be slowing things down again. Away from grand environments and back to the small test level. I need to work out melee and ranged combat again as I switched systems. Invector’s 3rd person controller is sweet stuff and deals with all the nitty things I had already programmed, like a health/damage system and basic player controls. It also takes these systems up a few hundred notches. So that is next week’s focus.

Then there’s behaviors. The AI needs serious love. Playmaker and Behavior designer are the tools I’ll be leveraging to come up with behavior trees and other game functionality. While writing the raw AI code is something I enjoy doing, it could also take a few months. The struggle of an Indie game maker is “Do I spend 3 months writing the code and doing basic graphic stuff, or do I incorporate a tool to speed things up?”. Thankfully I can and will do both.

There’s also plans for the inventory system, crafting, quests and a whole lot more. But those are all in the coming weeks and months.