After several months of feeling blocked, both by the lack of time I had to work on the game and by life circumstances, I finally think I’m making progress on Beyond the Chiron Gate.
This last week I’ve been working on the procedurally generated text descriptions of planets. I’ve realised that these are the heart of the game: if they’re fun to read, the game will at least be marginally entertaining even if nothing else works; if they’re awkward or boring, nothing else will make up for that. So I’ve been putting together code for how the game represents planets internally, and how it translates these data into text descriptions. I’m not working on randomly generating planets yet, so I’m using our own solar system as test data. Here’s how the current system describes Mars:
A small terrestrial planet with a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. Its rocky surface is covered in mountains and craters. Dry river valleys trace a web across the surface, suggesting that liquid once flowed there, and dust storms periodically obscure parts of its surface. The planet is tilted somewhat on its axis, giving it distinct seasons in its northern and southern hemispheres, and its orbit is slightly eccentric.
Right now I’ve got a system that can describe lifeless planets and moons. The next step will be to work out how to model and describe life, and after that intelligent life. My plan is for these to be separate paragraphs in the planet descriptions: one paragraph for the physical attributes, another for life if it’s present, and a third for civilisation if that’s present.
The planet description system currently assumes that the planet is thoroughly explored. In the final game, some information will be hidden until the player has explored a planet (e.g. the subsurface oceans of ice moons like Europa), so the description system will have to generate different text before and after this exploration.
Once I’ve got the description system working, I’ll move on to mechanics for the exploring planets, and for randomly generating star systems.