Testing stress

We are currently in the process of performing capacity / stress tests in front of our upcoming ad. campaign.

Over time we hope to increase our player base significantly and, while we are fairly certain our architecture can handle it load, we need to make sure that all of the different game systems does as well.

In the picture above you can see what the game would look like if roughly 200 players decided to press the "send caravan to Visby"-button at the exact same time.

As a side note, if you have ever been to Gotland, and especially Visby, during the so called Almedalen week, the traffic in the screenshot will probably look familiar to you.

Clutter

One issue that we have been marinating on for a while is the challenge of screen clutter. Even with very few estates in a parish, all of he different game systems quickly make the scene hard to read.

This fact will only get worse as the game grows in player numbers.

To combat this we have introduced several changes over the course of development.

This screenshot shows the alpha/pre-alpha parish map, a much smaller map than the one we have today. This allows for more space, but also for more estates, so it doesn't really alleviate the problem.

Another change that we are currently working on is content aware zoom. This basically means that only the most important information is displayed when zoomed all the way out. The more you zoom in, the more content is revealed.

We are also looking at resizing roads and all traveling entities (caravans, troops etc). The challenge is to find the right balance between readability and clutter.

Duality

While we are looking to reduce clutter on the one hand, we are also experimenting with ways to procedurally generate terrain fixtures in order to make the world feel more interesting and lived in.

One such feature has always been our road system that procedurally generates roads, or re-uses existing ones if possible. This makes every season of Imperia Borealis look and feel different and carry it's own sort of history throughout its duration.

Another feature we are experimenting with can be seen (with placeholder art) in the picture above. The island is currently to flat, so we wanted to add forests and other landmarks. Any such feature would at the same time need to work alongside our existing systems, such as the road/path system. In our internal prototype the forest clears a path for any placed entity (including roads), but can also regrow over time if a road, estate, outpost etc, should ever be removed.

The implementation of this is fairly straight forward. We generate it using a simple perlin noise function and then project a texture on the resulting forested area. The underlying dataset is similar to a bitmap, where 1 is forest and 0 is not.

When a road, or any other placed entity, is generated we simply take an eraser and remove any 1s in the bitmap at that point (and with a rounded padding around it) and then redraw the final image.

Fun fact, i first implemented a version of this algorithm for a game jam entry about a mole almost 20 years ago.

Next steps

Our fight against clutter, and for adding new interesting features, continues. In an upcoming post i will dive deeper into how our pathfinding and road-generation systems work.

You can try out Imperia Borealis for free right now at: Imperia Borealis