A World Apart

A World Apart is a mash between a Turn Based Strategy game like The Banner Saga and a Procedurally Generated Node-Based game like FTL.
Follow three survivors of the Theseus Mission, sent from a dying earth to find a new inhabitable planet, as they navigate a frozen wasteland toward the rest of thier crew. Together they encouter strange aliens, not so strange surroundings, and uncover truths about the planet and themselves.

Challenges and Observations

The biggest challenge with world apart was trying to fit all the parts together. I knew, in theory, what kind of combat would be enticing and generatable, and what I wanted from the overworld travel and the storytelling, but I couldn't quite put everything together. At first, the game had combat nodes evenly distributed and story nodes highlighted in order. Which this worked somewhat, it also meant that the player wouldn't have the same level of freedom as we'd like. In addition, this way of spreading out the story was too linear, and we wanted the player to experience an dynamic story.

Eventually, me and the team's lead coder came up with the idea and implementation of a dialogue index system. Essentially, dialogue would be indexed based on thier story relevance and its place in a chain of story elements. This way, we could generate story nodes, but not assign stories to those nodes until the player has gone to it, and wouldn't experiance the story out of order. 

Another big challenge we had was with how we were going to generate everything. We wanted things to be random, but not too random. In the first iteration of map generation, the map nodes were generated in hexagons and looked too evenly spaced. We tried again by randomizing the location of nodes within hexagons, but it still seemed too rigid. We finally decided to generate by randomly skipping certain hexagons (but not too many at once) and placing nodes radomly within those hexagons. This lead to a more organic map, which we eventually made more organic by generating clutter (trees and building and such) based on thier proximity to a node.

Combat generation was also a challenge. We found our initial methods to be too random. Eventually, we settled on generating combat from a large list of predetermined maptypes, obstacle layouts, and unit placements. This still allowed for procedurally generated enviroments while maintaining a designed feel.