Hey folks!
As the weekend closes, so does #procjam, and I am taking slow, deliberate steps away from my map generator, which has been so delightfully distracting the past ten days.
I’ve uploaded the latest iteration which procedurally generates a history to go along with the map. If you’ve got a few, you can sit back and enjoy the lightshow as agricultural revolutions sweep across the globe and then states develop, forge alliances, and wage seemingly endless war.
Full disclosure caveat: the states are dumb. Oh my gods they are so incredibly stupid. They expand into territory they can’t actually exploit. They merge with other states just because their elites speak the same language. Sometimes they collapse just because they mismanaged their treasuries and can’t pay their armies and everything goes sideways. I could call these bugs, but I’m choosing to call them accurate depictions of how history tends to go down.
The idea behind the project, if there ever really was one, was that you can fire up the generator and let the history bits run until the map looks interesting and then use it for your gaming/writing/daydreaming purposes. In general, I think it works for that purpose, but it is a firehose of procedurally generated data. I think I spent as much time trying to display information in a compact and efficient manner as I did actually generating said information.
If you want to really dig into things, you can right-click on the page in Chrome and select ‘Inspect’ (in Safari, it’s ‘Inspect Element’). You can then select the Console tab from there. Every time you click on the map, the console will display the tile you clicked on, and by clicking little turn-down triangles you can go deep, deep, deep into lots of very geeky imaginary details. Like, there’s fictional lexicons of fictional languages down in there.
This was fun, and I learned a whole bunch, but I am looking forward to getting back into some work that’s a little more practical for the rest of the month. I’m sure I’ll come back around to tinker with the generator in the future, and I’d love to hear any feedback you have for me. You can leave it here or hit me up on Google+.