Biomes strategy (Patreon)

I’ve taken the trees from the last post and put them straight into the game. This is never going to look great for a few reasons:

• The sketches are to indicate a vague artistic direction, so are done quickly and are rough quality.
• They are line-art based, which clashes with the more realistic lineless game assets.
• There’s only 1 variation, when really there should be at least 5.
• They don’t save separated leaf layers, so any random colour variation either has to apply to the whole plant or nothing at all. (I chose the whole plant).
• There’s no colour correction or integration with their intended tilesets, so some of them are way too saturated, too bright, or too dark.
• They are not accompanied by the correct ground decoratives, since those don’t exist yet.

Despite all these reasons to look bad, there’s still something pretty cool about seeing these designs in the game.

It took quite a long time to set up all the different tree placement rules. (I’ll explain that process more in a future post.) But now that I have those rules in place I’ve been doing experiments with how “fuzzy” the placement rules are. Initially all the trees only placed exactly where they were told, so one tree type could only coexist with 2 or 3 other neighbour types and there was very little mixing. By effectively blurring the edges of the placement rules I’ve allowed trees to mix further outside of their intended biome. The mixing is very clumpy, so that they can make little pockets of invader species in other biomes and it gives quite a nice effect.

The goal for doing all of this now is so that I can start to get a feel for the biomes so far. The next part of the plan is to get some placeholder art done for the ground level decoratives, the alien equivalents of grasses and bushes. At the same time I can notice other things that are lacking with what I have so far. For example, I think it would be nice to add a broad-leafed plant with red leaves. I’m not sure if that will be a completely new design or a mutation of one of the existing ones.

That leads into the approximate plan for how the alien biomes vs space exploration content will be split:

The plan is to have alien biomes run the base distribution technology. It will be able to have terrain of all the different hues and brightnesses, but the built-in vegetation style will be similar to vanilla (+palm trees, snow trees, etc). Trees can have their leaves tinted by code, so there can still be trees of all colours this way, the same as the current alien biomes. Most of the new tilesets will be there, but some of the weirder ones, like for the Xenorkyd planet, will be outside of the main alien biomes mod.

Other mods will then be able to add or restrict parts of the system. So for example, with Space Exploration, the default planet will be restricted to a more vanilla style colour scheme. If you go to a fungal planet, not only will there be a different colour scheme, but some of the vegetation styles will be swapped for something that’s more specific to the planet. Various towering mushrooms, lichen carpets, and so on.

This should make it fairly easy for other mods to make use of the new alien biomes systems too. Also with the way that the 0.7 Space Exploration planets system works, it should be much easier for other mods to add their own planet types with equally unique vegetation.