The post explores technical strategies for creating an expansive game world with effective rendering techniques and performance optimizations in game development.
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Thomas ten Cate, aka Frozen Fractal, is a Dutch indie game developer focused on innovative web and mobile games.
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The blog post discusses the process of planting trees in a procedurally generated game world, focusing on the selection of tree species, modeling techniques in Blender, and the challenges of ensuring realistic plant placement with...
The blog post discusses the process of placing ports in a procedurally generated game world. It outlines the requirements for port placement, including geographical considerations and distribution methods. The author explains the ...
The post celebrates the one-year anniversary of 'Around The World,' detailing its development journey, technical challenges, and future gameplay milestones.
The author discusses the process of enhancing the visual appeal of a game by adding vegetation to a terrain, while also addressing the technical challenges of climate and biome mapping. They detail their transition from a C# imple...
The text discusses the process of creating a realistic terrain for a game using height maps and noise. The author explains the challenges faced and the solutions found to ensure that the terrain is suitable for placing port cities...
The author discusses hydraulic erosion and the process of simulating it in game development. They describe their attempts at creating a simple erosion algorithm and the challenges they faced. They also explore the stream power law...
The author explains why he decided to start over with his game development project, citing issues with the spherical world shape, dissatisfaction with C#, and the need to migrate away from his custom ECS. He has now started over u...
0Around The World, Part 21: Visibility
2025-02-04 •
The text discusses the visibility in a game focused on exploration. It explains how to restrict visibility, the problem of rendering unexplored areas, and the challenge of rendering distant objects. The author also talks about usi...
The author discusses the slow progress of the game development due to lack of time and scope creep. They talk about the decision to abandon the entity-component system (ECS) and switch back to a more customary Godot scene tree. Th...
The author discusses the increasing requirements for developers to publish apps on the Google Play Store, including the need for a D-U-N-S number, phone number and email address for users to contact, and official documents to veri...
0Around The World, Part 19: Constructing languages
2024-08-09 •
The text discusses the process of generating foreign languages for a game. It describes the use of algorithms to produce languages and names for cities, seas, coasts, and islands. The author experiments with Markov chains and lett...
0Around The World, Part 18: Charting the seas
2024-07-24 •
The text discusses the importance of maps in game development and the process of drawing nautical charts for the game. It explains the difference between maps and charts, and the effort required to create a complete and correct ma...
The author discusses the procedural generation of the world in the game Around The World, focusing on the world map, water depth, ice caps, and port placement. The post also explains the process of filling the oceans, adding ice c...
0Around The World, Part 16: A matter of scale
2024-06-18 •
The author discusses the challenges of creating a realistic world generator for a game, focusing on the scale of the world and the need to adjust it for gameplay. He explains the need to compress time and scale down the world, as ...
0Around The World, Part 15: Making waves
2024-05-31 •
The text discusses the process of creating realistic water in a game. It covers the use of shaders, the creation of waves using sine waves, the addition of transparency and reflections, and the challenges of representing waves on ...
0Around The World, Part 14: Floating the origin
2024-04-11 •
The text discusses the precision problems with single-precision floating point numbers in the Godot engine, particularly when dealing with large-scale worlds. The author explains the limitations of floats and the issues they cause...
0Around The World, Part 13: Zooming in
2024-03-25 •
The text discusses the process of zooming in on a procedurally generated world in game development. It covers the resolution of the world, the generation of 3D terrain meshes, the addition of fine details using simplex noise, and ...
0Around The World, Part 12: 2D or not 2D
2024-03-19 •
The author discusses the challenges of representing a spherical world in a game, considering 2D and 3D options. He ultimately decides on a top-down 3D perspective, inspired by modern RTS games.
The author discusses the challenges of working with a sphere in game development. He explains the difficulties with coordinates, geometry, grids, areas, neighbours, interpolation, noise functions, splatting, and distance transform...
0Around The World, Part 10: Fixing the climate
2024-01-02 •
The text discusses the process of fixing the climate classification in a game development context. The author explains the challenges faced in accurately representing different climate zones and the adjustments made to the algorit...
0Around The World, Part 9: Climate
2023-12-29 •
The text discusses the importance of local climate in deciding vegetation and trade goods in a game. It explains the Köppen-Geiger classification system and its alternatives, and the author's efforts to implement the Köppen classi...
0Around The World, Part 8: Seasons
2023-12-19 •
The post discusses the development of algorithms to generate temperature and rain maps for an entire year, taking into account the seasonal variations. It explains the creation of two weather patterns for January and July, and the...
0Around The World, Part 7: Temperature and rain
2023-12-15 •
The text discusses the analysis of 10 years of weather data from Earth, focusing on temperature and rain. It explains how temperature depends on latitude and altitude, and how rainfall is influenced by wind and temperature. The au...