I am often asked to explain what engineers do. “Do you program the characters to make them move?” No. “Do you code the worlds?” No, not really. That’s when I start talking about algorithms, and eyes begin to glaze over. It’s honestly a pretty difficult thing to explain. A lot of what we do doesn’t necessarily translate to what people picture when thinking about their game experience.

That’s why I’m so pumped Damian made this video.

The setting of “The Flame in the Flood” is what is known as a “procedural world.” What that means is that every time you play the game, the world will be completely different. Everything from the shape of the river, to the items that you find, to where the predators are stalking will be unlike the last time you played the game. This is what programmers live for.

This video takes you, step by step, through how we are currently building the river. It’s a little bit of a look behind the curtain. When playing the game, you feel like Scout and Aesop are paddling down a fully formed riverworld. What you don’t see is that, a short distance ahead of you, the world is being created piece by piece.

We’d like to apologize for a few instances of bad framerate in the video and the placeholder art. Most of what you see came from test to make sure our code is working. We just thought it looked cool and wanted to share it. If you have any questions or comments, hit us back at bryn@themolassesflood.com or damian@themolassesflood.com

- Bryn

PS: Thanks to Yellowbelly for letting us use their music!