Hi! I’m not entirely sure who I’m writing this for, but alas, I’m writing it assuming someone will read it. This is going to be a dev blog where I can record my progress on some of the personal projects I’m working on primarily (for right now) a Map Generator I’ve built and plan to build a game around. I’m happy with where it is right now, but before I develop it further, or start building a game on top of it, I’d like to optimize it. Most of my posts will be about this optimization process, and I’ll be posting timestamps with each optimization pass so I can log my progress!

So currently my map generator output looks like this:

The goal of the generator was to generate a landmass that felt believable, and that had diverse biomes and elevations. I got to this point using a combination of a bunch of different things that I’ll go over later. It is worth noting though that Amit Patel over at Red Blob Games is an eloquent genius, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from his series on how he built the polygonal terrain generator for RoTMG.

The first step of optimization is to enable myself to track progress in the form of installing a timer. I’d also like to set up a system that will allow me to easily save the seed and a screenshot of the output for both documentation and design purposes. Those are my next two tasks.