Well, I know I've been a bit inconsistent with keeping up the Taluka Blog posts (he said, addressing the void), but work has actually continued on the game, with the Bottom of the Bay and Hoi Island areas currently being mapped. With that in mind, the theme of this blog post is Digital Landscaping.

This is probably going to sound very egotistical and snootily artistic, but… with Book 1 Gold, I'm trying to make the landscape look more realistic and natural than my previous games, and to get away from the sort of "square" look that tends to happen with the tiles used in the system. To that end, I'm using a lot of very random shapes for the terrain, with a lot of sudden shifts and odd corners and angles, to give the landscape a look almost like a topography map, but with all the details like trees and wildlife added in. I've also decided to not go in planning more than a vague idea of what features I want to add to a given map, so that the terrain sort of flows on its own to wherever it's going. This tends to make a lot of shapes that are very squiggly and random, which looks rather like nature, especially on ancient, weathered rock faces that have been at the mercy of fickle elements for millions of years.

To demonstrate this, I'm posting an early screenshot of Hoi Island (sorry for the low resolution; it was the only way to fit it all in one screen).

Hoi Island Map

Note particularly the lack of symmetry in both the rocks on the island and the shape of the island itself (yes, I went the semi-cliche route and made it look like a turtle, but at least it's nowhere near symmetrical, and thus far more interesting to look at). Also note that it's not quite finished, and still has a bit of landscaping, especially on the outlying islands, to work on.

For the programmers out there, look in the upper left corner. That zig-zag arrow-looking thing... that's all the events that are running while you're on that one map. Yeah.

I would have added the Bay area as well, but its terrain is far less complete, even though it better exemplifies the random ways the terrain is placed on the map.

Also, I'm definitely planning on re-opening the topic when the next Demo is ready, probably when it hits the testing stage (I'm doing testing with all releases now, especially after Piraka Mania's extended debugging problem).

Well, until next time, I'll keep on makin' that game.