I was hoping to post this dev blog last night, but then a nice man called Charles bought us beer, and things got a little hazy after that.
Anyway, the first piece of exciting news of this week, as members of the mailing list will tell you, is the fact that Fate of the World and the Tipping Point expansion will both be on sale for a 50% discount all next week on Steam.
This is something we’d been wanting to do for a while, as we saw on the forums people wanting to play the game, but also wanting to wait until it was on sale. Hopefully this will give you all the chance to try it out.
In other news, we had a very positive design discussion earlier in the week, on how the new game board will be modelled.
One of the key features we want to introduce in FOTWO is proper land usage modelling, so we can track things like permafrost melting, increased desertification, degradation of agricultural land, and more nuanced deforestation (new growth forest is not as effective a carbon sink as old growth, for example).
To make this simulation task manageable, we have to split the world up into chunks. Our first guess was to use square cells 10 miles on a side. At this resolution, the world’s biggest country (Russia) would be approximately 500 cells wide and 400 cells deep.
Conversation then moved on to whether this was too much of a design burden to manage, and whether using a scale of 100 miles was better, or too crude.
It was at this point, Delnar suggested using a Goldberg polyhedron like this one, and modelling the whole globe as hexes (with a handful of pentagons thrown in for good measure).
Clive fiddled around with his Domestic screen mock-up, and came up with this sample of what this underlying system might actually look like in game:
Overall, we’re quite taken with it. Lots more experimentation and discussion to go, but it’s one of those solutions that just feels right. And, if we ever start modelling military activity in the game as well, having the world already turned into hex map sounds like a pretty good idea….