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Cart #mcg_qndgalgen-1 | 2025-01-07 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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The Quick 'N' Dirty Galaxy Generator builds off of my my Quick 'N' Dirty Planet Generator by adding procedurally generated planets, routes, names, and governments to create a nice, compact little galaxy to explore. Right now, it's just a toy, but you can probably see where I'm planning to go with this!

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Map feels a bit flat, compared to the pseudo 3D of the planets.
Even if it's just circles and lines, having the coordinate be 3D and give the possibility to rotate the 3D map would be pretty cool.
The pico8 32 colors palette has a lot of greens, that can be used to make a gradient. Using tlines with green gradient with brighter in the front and darker in the back could help sell the 3Dness of the map, even if it's really just circles and (t)lines in the end. Just a thought. If you need the tokens for the actual game play, that should be the priority.


I might add some parallax background to the map, but I'm inclined to keep it 2D for a few reasons, token count not being the least of them. I've always liked the look of 3D maps, but I've never really liked the function of them–they always feel clunky and trickier to visualize and navigate than a simple 2D projection. (I'm lookin' at you, Starfield. 😐) All that said, I do like the idea of using a tline to fake the routes, that's a clever and lightweight hack. I might look into trying to pack that in here, though I'd probably stick to the greyscale to minimize palette juggling. Thanks!

I've already burned a lot of tokens on the map and planet rendering (along with half my sprites and map space), and I've got a lot more I'd like to cram into this cart, so I'm likely to pull more out of this than I'd like to put in. That said: the main routines that generate the data for the map and planets are both reasonably compact and entirely deterministic, which will be extremely useful when it comes time to load a saved game.

I still have some cleanup to do here–for example, I forgot to shuffle the government types, and I've noticed that the territory-building algorithm can take over other capitals, which is behavior I want to avoid. It's still a fun start, though!



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