That on its own took awhile to do, but just because it took awhile doesn't mean that there's a lot to write about! So I pulled extra hard and wanted to make sure to get a major feature in with this one.
Exploration in these sorts of games is extremely important. Not knowing the map in-advance creates new gameplay aspects and makes settling the world a lot more challenging. My main question, was how was I going to represent unexplored territory?
My first thought was clouds but that's just because Sid Meier's Civilization V did it, so I decided against it. My second thought was to render all unexplored territory as just being black but I felt that a dark color like that covering the screen took away from the bright cheery look that I wanted the game to have. That immediately made me think of using the opposite extreme, white, but that was going too far.
I ended up settling on a nice tan color to represent it as an uncharted map similar to Europa Universalis IV:
I keep saying this, but this really is another feature that makes the game feel so much more final. I can't wait until I say that enough times to where the game is in a state where I can start playing it with my friends!
Although this update is pretty important, it's not without its flaws. City & Unit bubbles still render over the unexplored tiles which means you can still see where units/cities are that are out of your sight:
I'm absolutely thrilled with this update, the game really is getting close to the point where I can start implementing multiplayer. Those will likely be the most boring update notes, because days of work would boil down to "This feature now works in multiplayer", which it's hard to write an entire blog post about that, so we'll see how that goes when we get there.
Sincerely,
Blake Gillman
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