Dulce Bellum Inexpertis

Apart from the monthly development report for patrons, I think that it could be very interesting to show a public roadmap of the game progress on the concept, design and development phases. So you can check the Board with the public roadmap at this page: Hextory public roadmap.

If you have any questions or comments about items on the roadmap, you can share them via Github Hextory discussions.

The most relevant feature on a hexcrawl is the hex map. So if I want to develop a hexcrawl, the obvious first step is to create a hexagonal grid and understand the particularities of the hexagon maps.

Some time ago I programmed a simple hexagonal grid generator. The source is public, and accessible from this repository: Configurable Hex Grid Generator. At this moment I’m working on improving the code and updating the dependencies to maintain up to date the project. I think that it could be useful for other developers prototyping their own hexagonal maps that are testing their own hex map ideas.

As a first step towards developing a prototype of the game, I’ve started to work on the Game Concept Document. I’m following this great guide from the Gamasutra site: The Anatomy of a Design Document, Part 1: Documentation Guidelines for the Game Concept and Proposal.

A Game Concept is primarily a sales tool, but it’s also very useful to write one for yourself as a way to structure your game idea. I want to use this document to bring interest around the creation process of the game, and letting people who support the project via Patreon to participate.

This is a Game Concept I created in 2015 for a web browser game. Use this example as a template to write one for your own game. I didn’t create any game from this concept. Only this document, and a marketing landing page that you can see at this url: Space Business tycoon.

My goal is to develop a turn based strategy video game which resembles a hexcrawl. I like pixel art, and the way a hex map abstract a region’s geography in video games like Battle of Wesnoth and Heroes of Might and Magic. Both games along with Dwarf Fortress are very inspiring for me.

A hex map representing an open world, and the freedom to explore the map the way you want, is the distinguishing feature of the Hexcrawls. The hex map is composed of regular hexagons of identical size. In this kind of game, the players explore a wilderness map navigating hex by hex. Each hexagon can contain a variety of points of interest, hidden locations and events or could trigger a random encounter when you travel to them.

This article is about the tech stack used to create this blog. My objective is to create a minimalistic blog with a focus on speed, simple to maintain and low bandwidth consumption.

The best way to achieve this objective is to create a static website. But if you create a lot of content, it could be impracticable to update and maintain the site, even creating your own templates. That’s the reason for the success of the static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo or Gatsby. They provide a simple framework to generate a static site in seconds.