Creating a Living World, part 1: Imitating Nature

In this series we’ll look at the world design of our upcoming game Fragment. In the game, we travel through a series of miniature fragment worlds, helping them with their problems and discovering the knowledge we need to find a new home for our people. We create a new universe on every playthrough, and an important part of the experience is making these miniature procedurally generated worlds feel organic and natural; a wilderness worth preserving.

In natural landscapes we see differences in how densely plants are spaced, a mix of clumps of trees and plants packed closely together and wide open areas.

Generally in most games centred around plants, such as farm simulations, you’d grow plants like this instead. The grid layout makes plants resemble a farm rather than a more natural landscape (and also makes the programming much simpler):

Garden designers going for a more naturalistic look instead place small clusters of plants for the aesthetics:

And wild plants that spread in an open field create their own growth patterns rather than a mass of uniform density:

So in the game world we would like to see similar patterns:

In the next part of the series we’ll look at how the rules of the game world create this effect!