Mechanatural Game Development

Alvaon is a world bringing together backstory and world-building elements I've been creating for two and a half decades, along with procedural mapping technology to fill in the spaces between the key locations and story elements. This will allow the creation of a world that feels big because it is physically huge, but where the player can easily focus on the interesting parts instead of being bogged down by travel. This will be implemented through a system of unlockable fly-points to create a balance between narrative direction and agency within logical bounds. Also, the development time will be able to be prioritized based on the importance of each experience within the game. rather than much of that time being spent creating the roads and hallways that connect those experiences.

When finished, a player could run from point A to point B as is so common in traditional RPGs, but hopefully they won't. The world will be too big for that to be a fun way to play. The current prototype terrain map shown below generates a map that will take about half an hour for the player to run from the starting location to the farthest visible land feature, and that is expected to be perhaps 1/10th of the way across the game map. Sure, there will be some stuff filled in procedurally if the player goes out there, but the key locations will be linked by fly-points and fast flying mounted travel is intended to be the norm.

To get an idea how this is constructed, the picture below shows the regions with differing levels of detail. Each region is 100 faces by 100 faces, composed of a 10x10 grid of 10x10 planes. Each level adds additional detail on top of the display of the level below to create an extensive terrain that isn't hopelessly resource intensive. The picture above only shows the outer 3 areas because I only am using placeholder art for the closer textures so they are ugly. The forest art isn't a final version but it is a much better approximation. One of the key things I needed to know is how distant forests would look. I grew up in the woods so I'm picky about vistas of distant forested hills.

The picture below shows how that it all fits together using the grid texture.

Next steps are to make the high-detail region move with the player which is about halfway implemented, to make the higher-detail regions blend better with the lower-detail regions which should be simple, and to add splat-mapping of textures, and to stitch the tiles together so there aren't obviously sharp-edged lighting around their boundaries.