Embracing the Procedural

It's been a hot minute since I've had a chance to update regarding Galliventurer. After playing around a fair bit with backends and trying a number of different nosql databases, one of which has been running pretty solidly with the existing discovered universe of a few hundred (470+ presently) stars and their 24k+ satellite bodies. Things are humming along quite nicely and there is even the beginning implementations of some actual game functionality, such as flying the (placeholder) ship through the universe in a soon to be released build! However there are several things that I hope to address in the very near future:

1. Procedural Universe

Whilst the universe is cool and all at the moment, it's very rudimentary and no where near close to the level of detail I'm after. From researching a bit, I've found everything that currently takes up space in the database can actually reside solely in an algorithm and follow the whole procedural generation a lot more faithfully. This will free up the database and server for actual game state data, with the added benefit of adding a layer of protection against misuse of the generator. The main pain point for this transition is going fully procedural but still having a universe that will be faithfully replicated the same across every player session no matter where in the universe they end up 🤔🤔

2. UI & Controls

This will probably have a very quick and dirty initial solution, followed then by a super long process to get the controls fully polished and usable on most (if not all) devices; starting with mobile, as this is mostly where I want to play the game 😅 - then moving to a standalone desktop launcher!

3. Graphical Styling

While everything is very placeholder at the moment, I will (probably much sooner than I'd like) need to start looking at a graphical style for the game. Not just the game rendering but the typeface, logo, general aesthetic, etc. Mostly the end result of this will boil down to: how much I can come up with on my own, and how much I need to bite the bullet and outsource to 3rd parties. I'm hoping to have an early prototype of planets, ship & main player avatar(s) soon, done solely by me, so have those expectations bars set to ultra low 🙃

Comments

Random Generation That's Not So Random

While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don't want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns - as you can see I haven't actually started thinking too much about the composition of the planets, stars, etc.

Keeping this probability based random selection in mind, I'm going to be using a dynamically weighted series of arrays to randomly select properties for entities in the Galliventurer universe. Using something very similar to (or based on) this article by Michael Czechowski https://observablehq.com/@nextlevelshit/rejection-sampling-in-javascript. The main bit of complexity here will be the values of a randomly selected property will affect the weights of the next selection. For example the size of a star will greatly change the weight of the probabilities fo…

Galliventurer - Dreaming of a Universe

n. Galliventurer - one who adventures whilst gallivanting. We have a name. A compound of the words gallivanter & adventurer it fits the game quite nicely. It will also be the name of the player's ship (though, you may be able to have many ships throughout the game).

Also trying something a little different for this project, practicing what I preach as it were. I'm actually going to plan this out a little bit before I ever actually write any code. Oddly I feel that most of my hair brain schemes of previous years have had a fast paced "rush to market before someone else thinks of this" attitude. So obviously there was no time to stop and take a moment to put any thought in before code went into editor. None of those projects ever made it out of the proof of concept phase oddly enough, no prizes for working out why.

In the spirit of all this, things are different this time around. Having given it even two minutes of thought there are several issues. Prewarming the…

Vacuous Social Data Sharing

It's the not so secret, dirty secret of our modern lives. We live in a golden age of free services that make our lives interconnected on levels that our ancestors couldn't even fathom. Instantaneous realtime interactive updates and vision of someone on the other side of the planet. For free!! We really do live the utopian lifestyle, or do we?

We are being monetized. The really insidious thing is, we like it. We crave it. Likes, follows, subscribers, retweets, pins, shares, the list goes on. We're subsumed in a culture of instant gratification and constant engagement. These "free services" have hijacked the way we think and live, all while making copious amounts of money from the personal data we all but throw at them.
Whilst there is an innate understanding in all of us about the nature of how insidious and conniving these services are. We still gobble up every morsel of social media's bright lights and flashy features, mostly without a single thought of who …

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