Interface

Using libgdx has been a good experience so far, and I’ve just about finished up my preliminary welcome screen when launching the game. It pops up with three tabs: one for updates (it inserts the posts from this wordpress) and logging in/launching the game, one for changing graphics/game settings (most of which have yet to be created), and one for viewing generally useful system information (I plan to add an ‘export’ button to this screen for easy sharing on the internet).

Next up comes the basic intro UI for the main screen of the game, a suitable background music for the ~3-5 minute max time a user should probably spend on this screen, and a button to create a new world – one of the few that will be first available to a new player of Gestalt. After this, the real fun begins, and I’ll throw myself into cartography and procedural terrain. My primary source of artistic inspiration is the Cartographer’s Guild. I plan to create a few worlds, nail down the style I want, and use a program to analyze the differences between the initially generated worlds and the final products of my artistic process, so it can then be applied (at least somewhat decently) to any newly generated procedural world off the bat, to also generate artistic maps for that world in a given style. This should take me roughly 6 – 8 months to really nail down.

A Beginning

I’ve started developing Gestalt using libgdx, and am getting the hang of creating a basic UI that has radio-like button groups, color-changing, and dynamic actions. First order: create the initial welcome screen with a Game menu (login to account, begin playing), Updates (which will display the most recent content from this WordPress), and Settings (for setting general game options – temporarily displaying the current settings).

Once this screen is roughly finished, I’ll move onto the game itself, whose first item of business will be the creation of the actual world terrain, and the subsequent generation of political, physical, topographic, climate, economic/resource, road, technological, and cultural maps of the generated world. Currently planned map projections for these styles include conformal, equal-area, equidistant, and true direction.