Chapter Three

It’s been a few months from the last post, but: We’re still working on the game!

We’re building in a bit of a new direction, moving away from the procedural-generated open world vision for the game and instead putting our efforts into expanding the actual game mechanisms alongside a smaller world with delightful characters.

We were initially drawn to the idea of a randomly generated world by its promise of near-infinite playability. What we found is that walking around our initial, naively generated world became boring after 30 seconds. We put a fair bit of work trying to make it more interesting: we added biomes, worked on generating more diverse terrain, and modeled different types of plants. And it was more interesting! But humans are very, very good at finding patterns in the noise and even with these additions the world started to feel repetitive after five minutes or so of wandering

We could have continued down that path and made even more complex and interesting nature, perhaps with little villages or buildings to stumble upon, but that is not the game we set out to make. We want our game to provide many fun, strategy-filled hours! We cannot pour effort into building out an interesting world and still have time left over to draft mechanisms that we’ll be proud of.

So we’ve bit the bullet and opted to make our game take place on a small, hand-built island. We changed the camera angle to align more with the game’s functionality and less with the beautiful scenery. It’d be nice if we could have figured this out sooner, but this is the path we took to get here. Hopefully we’ll be able to take some of what we learned in trying to make a beautiful world with code and be able to apply it to our new handcrafted setting.

We’re also not sure what the game will be called this time around. It’s operating under the code-name “Halmi V2” but we’ve also toyed with the name “Penguine”, pronounced like ‘linguine’. (Hint: there are penguins!)

We’ve mostly settled on a vision for Halmi V2, but it’s still a little changeable. To avoid promising a lot and then failing to deliver, the plan is to share future content as we make it. Stay tuned!

Till next time,
Jinny & Charles