Atlas Arcana v1.0 is live (and what's next...)

Atlas Arcana has officially reached v1.0, adding camera controls, advanced generation options, and the GNU GPL3 license!

It's official - we're feature complete and have launched version 1.0. Most exciting, in my opinion, is the ability within the new Advanced Generation controls to now enter a Random Seed value (your name, for example, or the name of your fictional world), and see a consistent map come to life. Perhaps you're curious how your map would look with hexagons rather than Voronoi cells. Or you'd like to adjust the river density. Or maybe you just want to revisit a map you'd generated previously.  The random seed lets you do that. Meanwhile, if you leave the Random Seed value blank, like it is by default, it will generate a new random seed for you each time. That new random seed will be printed in your output log and export file, however, so if you ever need to recreate the map, you can easily copy-paste it back into the Random Seed field.

Camera controls were interesting and took a little getting used to, including some surprisingly fancy math needed to properly zoom and position new maps of varying sizes within the display frame. You can now zoom in and out, rotate the map, and use the compass rose controls to pan in 8 different directions. And, if you ever lose the map or just want to reset, you can hit the central @ button to snap it back to its original view. I had been hoping to also include some pseudo-3D tilt behaviour but Godot's Camera2D node doesn't quite allow me to do what I'd need on that front. I also tracked down a font with some good unicode support (GNU Free Sans), to ensure the various arrows I use for my camera controls render properly when played on the web.

And that font search also led me to what I feel is a suitable copyleft / open source license for the project: the GNU General Public License 3.0. In short, this license grants you the following freedoms:

• the freedom to use Atlas Arcana 1.0  for any purpose,
• the freedom to change Atlas Arcana 1.0 to suit your needs,
• the freedom to share Atlas Arcana 1.0 with your friends and neighbors, and
• the freedom to share the changes you make.

Credit isn't mandatory but I'd appreciate a shout-out for Atlas Arcana and Arcane Games if you put it to use. And forgiveness for some messy back end coding would be appreciated as well. I've attached the downloadable zip file for v1.0 to this devlog for those who want to crack it open. Regardless, now that v1.0 is launched, I'll continue to support it with bug fixes and, if I feel inspired, I may occasionally tinker with it to add new features. If there's significant interest, I can also open up my GitHub to the public to allow forking and branching as needed. 

What's next for Arcane Games?

Well that's a funny story. I'd mentioned after v0.4 that I was going to take a bit of a break to focus on some other projects.  One of those projects was to plan out my transition from building tools to building games. Atlas Arcana was born out of an idea for a medieval fantasy Grand Strategy game where you'd expand your small local clan to a world-spanning empire over the course of many generations. The game would play out on random Island-style maps, with you starting with control of a single Voronoi region. But two things happened:

1. I started researching the dynastic gameplay of Crusader Kings 3 and came to the conclusion that they'd done a really good of capturing some of the key aspects of dynastic gameplay I had been hoping to explore. And, while I'd be bringing my own special sauce to the mix, as a AA studio that's 3 games into the franchise, they'd already gone many layers deeper into those core design ideas than I'd be able to as a solo developer.
2. President Trump opened his big mouth and started trying to gobble up Canada as his 51st state. As a student of both History and Political Science, it left me feeling like he's trying way too hard to follow a certain Anschluss playbook from 1938. So no, my appetite for medieval fantasy is out, and the time has come to tell a very specific story instead: one where a trio of uniquely capable young women take on the nazis during World War 2.

I know, I know, there's no shortage of videogames where you beat up nazis (I'm looking at you, Wolfenstein). Even once you weed out all the shooters and narrow the scope to Adventure RPGs, you'll still find a few. But this one's special, I promise you. There's going to be a little bit of magic, a little bit of history, a little bit of swing, and a whole lot of mission-based Adventure RPG goodness. It's going to get dark and, as your friendly neighbourhood storyteller, I'm not going to pull any punches. But on the other side of all that darkness will be the most beautiful light. 

I'll be building it in the open here on itch, with plans to transfer over to  Steam as the pieces come together (and if anyone knows some Canadian-made platforms, let me know). I'll add a link to my Atlas Arcana page once I have some initial progress to show.