My next project planned for Steam

Wow has it been a while! I'm so grateful though because all that time I wasn't posting was the time I was getting paid. I'm so used to doing revenue share work that never gets published or working part-time it just feels immensely satisfying to being doing contracts now in game development programming.

So now being more financially secure than I was, I have finally been able to get back to work on some of my own games!

DEEP SPACE 2

Just kidding. I really do want to do a Deep Space 2 in the future but it's a big high-budget of a project since it would be a long first-person singleplayer story game (literally entirely different from the first game) and that sort of game takes quite a bit of development time & budget to pull off.

No, for now, I thought I'd work on something more practical. I've really been wanting to do an RTS for a while (If you look at my "What I've been doing these 5 months" post you'll see that I worked on several procedural generating projects & RTS's. Well, I'm back at it!

This project was inspired by Steel Division: Normandy 44, a war game by Paradox Interactive. I just thought that the territory system was so cool that it'd be amazing to be implemented into other genre's. I've been calling my new game RTS but it will be turn-based. The best way I can describe it is it's basically like Civ V (not 6 >:c ) mixed with Steel Division's territory system, with more focus on war than civ had. Unlike Civilization, however, the game will most likely not be about advancing through the ages and instead just upgrading the fantasy/medieval age that you're already in (Like going from a wooden sword to iron, etc.)

I've literally only just started on the project. I've taken everything I learned from the procedural generating I did those last months and applied it here. This is the single most optimized generating system I have ever designed, able to generate a 128x128 (16,384 tiles) map w/ color in 0.14 seconds.

Now, of course, that sounds impressive and all (and it is) but that number will grow exponentially when I start adding the actually intensive generating like trees, resources, etc. And not to mention when the map isn't flat and actually has hills & such that'll make rendering take a lot longer.

Overall my estimate is that my current optimized system will be capable of generating a 200x200 map in 20 seconds when everything is finished, which is still faster than Civilization V. But that's high hopes haha! I'm pretty slow at loading/saving though so that'll probably be slower than Civilization.

Anyway, with all that text here's an example of a 128x128 map that was generated in 0.14 seconds:

Again, the map is completely flat (2D) at the moment, but the actual game will be 3D so it'll take a lot longer to render in the future. But I made it 2D for now so that I could test generating without having to worry about looks.

Thanks for reading! And sincerely,
Blake Gillman