Game Design 2: A History Lesson

Which is a grand-sounding way of saying, "this is where this project has been!"

Development started way back in the year 2006. I built a terrain engine using Game Maker's native 3D functionality, then expanded that into a small RTS engine. To be honest, it wasn't very good, either in design or in graphical power. (the latter may be explained by the engine I was using)
It looked like this: (Please ignore the lack of modeling)

By March 2007, it was obvious to me that this engine was just not powerful enough for what I wanted to do. So I began investigating exteral graphics solutions, and eventually decided upon one called Xtreme3D. I worked on this version of the game for about a year, improving significantly on the visual effects present in the game (Although not so much on the models). I added actual lighting and 3-dimensional trees, and animated models. This was the last version to use roads as a game mechanic: in subsequent versions, one could place buildings anywhere. Aside from that, however, most of the game design was solidified by this version.

Version three was started in mid 2008. I switched graphics engines again, this time scrapping all of my graphical assets and starting over. My modeling ability had much improved by this point, and the results actually looked acceptable! Additionally, I was able to greatly expand the scale of the game, introducing some important optimizations in the process. This was the first version of the game to make use of shaders.

By 2009, it looked like this:


An additional feature developed at this time was the map generator. Using diamond-square noise patterns, layered and combined in various manners, it was able to generate some very interesting, natural-looking maps, as well as the climate and fertility data for them.


And so we come to August 2010, when Dawn of Civilization Mark IV was officially begun. Already it is graphically superior to any of its predecessors, not to mention much faster. During the course of development, I have learned how to produce high-quality low-polygon models, how to create and apply textures, and how to program in HLSL. Moving forward, I am eager to continue development on DoC, and see where it may go from here.