I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery.
I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored.
Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.
I am the procgen map admirer. These are my favorite map generators and the folks who create them.
👇THREAD👇
To start with, you can't talk about map generation and not mention @redblobgames. His HTML5 generator is the gold standard.
The quantization of the map into hexes. The beautiful terrain iconography. They partition the gestalt into something explorable in discrete steps, one story at a time.
.@redblobgames's generator's pencil sketch style (which was stumbled upon accidentally) produces the most visually stunning generated maps I've seen.
Next: the continents of Dwarf Fortress (@Bay12Games) were the first generated maps that truly blew me away. They're the most artful use of ASCII I've seen and the biggest influence on the visual style of Caves of Qud.
The rich ANSI greens evoke unbounded lushness. The landmasses teem with jungles that ride right up to the coasts. These are wild, untamed worlds.
Absolutely support @bay12games for their lush jungle continents and a hundred other reasons.
A "real" fake map aside: as research for @unchartedatlas, Martin collected maps from across fantasy and science fiction and made a bot that tweets them out every couple hours.
Now we get to city maps and @mewo2's equally stunning @metropologeny. I love how tiny neighborhoods of rectangular order are concatenated along the sinuous paths of nature.
We're back to the world-scale and @Enichan's generated pixel continents for her game Shards of Immortality. I dig the use of lighter blue to indicate shallow coastal waters.
.@Enichan's pixel maps really illustrate the allure of fractal discovery. Like: I want to learn about the politics of the prosperous river kingdoms in <img1>, but I also want to read about sheep lineages on the island meadow of <img2>.
Finally, I want to shout out @GridSageGames and the research he did for Cogmind's map tech. There's a certain juxtaposition of order and chaos that emerges from long-lived human edifices, and these maps really nail it.
Josh also uses cellular automata to produce natural, cavern-like maps, which envelop the more ordered spaces.
Another 🧵 of AI-generated images from Caves of Qud text prompts (again, BigSleep, first tries). This time: terrain descriptions and a few items.
First, an orrery: "Brass gears, balls, and rings turn in precise mimicry of worlds and stars."
"In stagnant pools, luminous lilies compete with the ribbon of stars in the night sky. Under the salt sun, though, they shrink into the shade of brine weed." [salt marsh]
"Spores dance in eddies across kaleidoscopic fungal bonnets. Rivers of primordial soup, cast in the light of lava, gurgle a quickening melody." [the Rainbow Wood]
Things You Believe About Caves of Qud if You're Acting in Bad Faith or Extremely Not Paying Attention, a thread
1. Q Girl is a dev self-insert
I put Q Girl in the game before we had any other contributing writers
2. The devs made Q Girl unkillable as a political statement
You can't kill Q Girl because, despite being cruel roguelike devs, we have hearts & feel bad when you brick your twenty-hour run by murdering a major quest giver.
Max's thread on tools that encourage reflection gets at an important facet of what I'm coming to understand emergent narrative to be: a cracking open and reification of the creative process.
Arguments against emergent narrative point to storytelling's holism, how stories must be conceived, arranged, and paced in proper ways to cohere meaningfully.
But there's also a lot of narrative meaning to uncover through working with the materials themselves, through storyFORMING.
Hey, my friend @RachelFellman's first fantasy novel, The Breath of the Sun, came out today! I want to tell you a bit about it.
Rachel is the long-time friend of my partner Mielle. She's utterly brilliant, so even though I hadn't read any of her fiction, I had high expectations.
And... she blew them away. The novel is so stunningly good.