Mutagion - game development begun

saluk on 2011/09/14 09:00 of Fruitbat the 13th
— edited on 2011/09/14 09:06

Yay! After a lot of difficulties just getting started, I have gotten a bit further. This morning I implemented the map, which took a surprising amount of time. I pulled in some real life city positions from a data file (I didn't want to manually place everything), but then I realized I had no idea how to turn latitude and longitude into pixel positions that would match up with any of the maps I had. So I had to go out and find a map in which the latitude and longitude lines were straight, so that I could handle the conversion myself without a bunch of crazy polar coordinate business that I don't have time to figure out right now. A good map that could be used in the game was really hard to come by. I managed to find a world map, took the america portion, and blew it up in a semi ugly but semi interesting pixelated way.

Then I put a glowy green filter over everything. I want to simulate the kind of outdated computer terminals that I like to imagine in my fantasy world the government still uses in these kinds of positions.

But once that was out of the way, I attached the virus simulation to it, and it is pretty cool to watch. There is still nothing for the player to do, but it's cool to watch the green cities turn red over time. And sometimes it will jump across connections even though I don't have air travel implemented, just because of the way people like to walk around. The coolest run only saw a portion of the map go red. Everyone must have died before it managed to spread everywhere? It's pretty rare to not get a total wipeout though. And air travel will probably kill the chances of that.

Tomorrow I need some gameplay, but I have a lot of ideas for that, so it should be fun to see how to interact with the already interesting simulation.