In which I talk of old projects, and introduce a new one – InfiniWorld, an infinitely scrollable procedural world.

Once upon a time I was very interested in the idea of procedural worlds – writing a program that generates mountains, coasts, cities, ecosystems, kingdoms, histories, plot hooks, etc.

So I played around quite a bit with Python, and built things I liked.

But I never actually released any of this, mostly because a lot of my graphics came from commercial products like RPG Maker, which I didn’t really have the rights to redistribute, but also because though Python has many qualities, “simple to distribute” isn’t one of them. Running one of these prototypes requires installing a bunch of libraries and trusting my code, or have me painstakingly generate an executable that would only work on a single platform. So they ended up collecting virtual dust on my disk drive while I got busy with life.

So I set those aside, got busy with life, and worked on other fun stuff – and in the process, I got much more comfortable with JavaScript. So eventually I used it to make new procedural worlds.

My goal wasn’t to make a game, but just to play with fun algorithms and make an interesting and endless world, focusing on meaningful descriptions and relationships rather than graphics.

And now you can test an early, very rough version: InfiniWorld.

It’s far from being nearly as interesting as I want it to be, but it should give an idea of what I’m aiming for. Some features:

You can click on cities to get a description. Those include some content from the excellent Abulafia website; My plan is to replace those with more meaningful descriptions.

You can drag the map around nearly infinitely (you will run into problems over 10 16 tiles in one direction), the content at a given place stays the same (until I publish a new version)

tiles in one direction), the content at a given place stays the same (until I publish a new version) The biomes distribution is inspired by the Whittaker Diagram.

You can find the sources on GitHub (this time I didn’t rely on a bunch of art I didn’t own).

There’s the old saying that “if you’re not embarrassed by your first version, then you didn’t release early enough”. I’m glad to say I pass that test!

That’s it for now! I’ll talk about crunchy details, as well as other projects, in later posts.