In this first weekly update I’d like to talk about the world in Maggies: Prelude.

I plan on making a longer post about world building in general, including ideas about what limits and constraints to keep in mind when building a world map for a game.

In the meantime, I want to talk about alliances in the game. This week I have been busy placing new entities in the world, making sure that they either settle or wander around.

This is only the beginning. I plan on adding some simple features to these alliances. You see, it always bothered me how in most games in my genre you never get to see why merchants show up or why they sell what they sell. More specifically, in Towns you get heroes that arrive near you without a clear goal. This simply reduces the ability of the player to engage with the world.

In other games, you still get the sensation that you are very isolated. Yet, caravans arrive like clockwork. And that bothers me. This is perhaps an aspect of dwarf fortress that has not been emulated by new games. I don’t think this is for fear of failure or lack of imagination.

It is simply a matter of taste and perhaps, the fact that such ideas are comparatively less important than other aspects of these games.

But I think that this approach is not the only valid one. I think it is essential to have an idea of how the world works, making sure that entities have goals and places to go, so that they eventually end up near you and you are able to influence them.

In the end, I want to empower players aided by their imagination. I cannot do that without giving some character to the entities in the game.

I want to finish this blog post by saying that I am really trying hard to keep everything as simple as possible. I do not wish to build complex AI or human-like AI. Just AI with some character.