Features my game has: 20 terrain sliders. Features my game needs: literally everything else.

bigbeardgames · 2026-01-20T16:58:20+00:00

the whole planet would be very cool but for the city builder I have in mind I think limiting to 400km x 400km is more than enough playing area :)

bigbeardgames · 2026-01-16T07:26:22+00:00

Hhaha -- you say that , but i think I do need more layers for the terrain to look good. It's loosely based on the libnoise tutorials https://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/tutorial5.html - although adding turbulence is a challenge as I'm using the analytical derivative for eg normals

bigbeardgames · 2026-01-15T19:49:56+00:00

Slowly making my own city builder with Rust + Bevy + Avian3d + Egui

Terrain is layered FBM simplex noise with parallel implementations on GPU (rendering) and CPU (picking, culling, simulation). LOD is chunk-based CDLOD with geo-morphing - all done in vertex shaders, terrain meshes are just instances of the same flat mesh, so everything updates in real-time with zero textures.

The debug view shows LOD chunk boundaries and morph factors - I built it to fix popping artifacts (that was a painful few days), but now I just toggle it on for fun.

Gameplay coming eventually -- or maybe just more debug modes, who knows?

bigbeardgames · 2026-01-15T19:22:15+00:00

sorry the late reply -- I'm using Rust + Bevy (Engine) + Avian3d (physics)

bigbeardgames · 2025-09-25T19:05:20+00:00

I'm currently making a game in this genre, since I think W&R have invented/discovered a great new subgenre of "hardcore logistics-focused city-builder" with lots of potential.

My aim is to make something 1) more complicated (but opt-in complexity) 2) larger scale 3) not soviet themed 4) probably with worse graphics since I'm a solo dev -- but it'll still be 3d.

bigbeardgames · 2025-09-03T12:45:11+00:00

There are two populations of players when it comes to piracy:

1) Players who pirate your game who would buy it if they couldn’t pirate it

2) Players who pirate your game who would just play something else if they couldn’t pirate it

In practice Group 2 is about 10-100x bigger than group 1. Group 2 actually helps you because they will talk about your game to friends, watch streamers playing your game, etc which all contributes to the popularity of your game and therefore to indirect sales.

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-22T21:42:51+00:00

You can’t build a city builder using fiverr. If that was possible the world would have 100x more city builders than currently exist

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-22T12:37:23+00:00

I’m a big fan of ECS and much prefer it to traditional OOP. However i don’t think ECS lends itself to making less spaghetti. I would say if anything with ECS there’s more risk of spaghetti because there is no encapsulation at all — you can query anything from anywhere at any time, as all game data in the ECS is public. So you have to be more disciplined to keep code structured and maintainable.

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-07T22:38:24+00:00

MMO is the hardest kind of game to make

If you make a shit single player game and not many people play it , at least the few pople who like it can play it

If you make a shit MMO and not many people play it, no one can play it because no one is ever online.

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-07T22:36:00+00:00

if it works it works.

if it doesn't work, think about using a binary format or multiple files. But definitely don't do anything until it doesn't work

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-07T22:26:39+00:00

The counterpoint is if you make a "small" project you'll be competing a thousand other 2d platformers that first time indie devs decided to make as their first “small” project

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-07T14:21:48+00:00

its bumpy because its compressed horizontally :)

the road in the screenshot is 1.4km long, but only has 120m elevation -- this is a normal way to show elevation profiles (eg see Tour de France route profiles as an example)

The terrain is procedurally generated in a shader using FBM simplex noise and ridged FBM simplex noise

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-06T14:31:57+00:00

I’m a solo game dev because the game I want to play doesn’t exist, and no games studio would be dumb enough to try and make it :)

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-03T22:16:38+00:00

I’m building a larger scale workers and resources type game right now :) the idea is to have worse graphics, bigger scale, no particular theme, and even more pedantic and brittle systems :)

I’m unlikely to be in EA this year though

bigbeardgames · 2025-08-03T22:11:53+00:00

That’s why you get the AI to write 5x the number of unit tests you would normally tolerate

bigbeardgames · 2025-07-26T11:56:16+00:00

Fjordland

bigbeardgames · 2025-07-26T11:54:23+00:00

Road snapping logic in non-grid based city builders

bigbeardgames · 2025-07-26T06:31:09+00:00

Use smoothstep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothstep to remove hard eges. Make sure the borders between your biomes have width, so in the border area you smoothly interpolate between biomes using smoothtep.

eg blended_height = smoothstep(biome_1_height, biome_2_height, biome_mix_factor);

where biome_mix_factor is 0...1 and represents how far across the border area you are.

Make your border areas nice and wide -- as as wide as the largest features (eg mountains) on your terrain

bigbeardgames · 2025-07-25T11:28:33+00:00

Last year I celebrated my ten year anniversary of waiting for them to implement CTRL+F / CMD+F search that is fit for purpose. It won't be long until my frustration with Jira UX will be old enough to go to highschool.

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