Caravan Experiment Newsletter #2

Hey Everybody!

Two weeks down and 14 more to go. I’m feeling… a grand inspiration.

Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestion or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Follow-up: Help Me Look for a New Title

Last week I asked you all to help me brainstorm potential new titles. In no particular order, here are the responses!

• Ascendless Journey

• Bizzarduous Journey

• Endless Ascent

• Jack McCaravan (very good)

• Convoyage

• Everastray

• Catastronauts (this one exists already! damn!)

• Catastrofiends

• Catastrofriends

• Eterniteam

• Eternitower

• Steeple People

No clear winner in my mind, but I feel we’ve damn good job plumbing the depths here. What do you all think, steeple people?

Call to Action: Help Me Create Some Music and Ambience

Music is currently a big blind spot for the demo. The game is silent except for a few UI widget clicks and clacks.

So if anyone out there is seriously into putting video-gamey music tracks together for the game or knows somebody who would be, please get in touch!

But even if you’re not a musician, there is another way you can help: throughout the game the Caravan passes through many different biomes. These biomes are randomly distributed throughout the game’s map each time it’s generated for a new journey. Different biomes serve the purpose of breaking up the game’s content as each is affiliated with a different elemental “type” (think Pokemon):

• Mountains - Earth

• Swamp - Rot

• Forest - Plant

• Desert - Fire

• Ocean - Water

When the Caravan is stopped in one of these biomes I’d like to play a soundscape that matches.

I found a really cool website that allows you to create soundscapes for free: ambient-mixer. Even if you don’t have time to make one, it’s worth checking out if you were ever curious what it sounds like in the Gryffindor Common Room or A Library, 1732.

So if you feel like taking a crack at making a soundscape for one of the biomes, give it a shot. I’ll put it in the game!

New Feature: Reworking the Map

Since the beginning, I always intended to adapt a solution to the problem of map generation from the game FTL. Their map affords the player a variable number of nodes to travel to during each leg of the overall journey. Prior to this week that was how my map was generated too. It plays well in FTL, but because of the variable number of nodes that game has need of a fuel resource to compensate for the increased value of visiting more map nodes.

Caravan used to have a fuel resource too, but in the years since making the original map generation algorithm a new game has captured my attention: Slay the Spire. It has a map with a static number of nodes per leg and I find it to be just as effective and less daunting for game balance.

So this week I went about reworking the map generation in Caravan to have a static number of nodes.

The algorithm goes like this:

• divide a rectangle into N equal horizontal slices where N is the number of nodes you want

• randomly partition each horizontal slice into a number of rectangles

• randomly place a node somewhere into each partition

• connect each node with any nodes above it whose partitions overlap

This produces a map which has a fixed path length while still looking fairly naturalistic. There is one wrinkle: it may produce maps which are too connected. The algorithm as described will always make an edge where one is possible. But since we only strictly need 1 edge to and from every node, we might want to tone down the degree of connectivity.

To do that, I added a random condition to create edges between overlapping partitions based on the amount to which they overlap. The percentage of time that an edge is created between two partitions is the ratio of the overlap to the smaller partition + 50%. That means that if any partition is 50% or more overlapped with another they will always form an edge. Here’s a graphic to show how the percentages change based on overlap:

Using this algorithm I’ve got a new map that I’m pretty happy with. I think for the purposes of the demo it will be more than sufficient and offers lots of room for tweaking. The distribution of biomes and types of encounters is still on the TODO list.

The aesthetics still leave much to be desired, but we’ll get to that later! Gotta get rid of those waffles…