Chris Crawford on Game Design

Map

The first sub-problem was the map representation. This problem had two components: terrain representation and hexgrid computation. A hexgrid is commonly used in wargames because it allows more precise directional alignment of units and doesn't have the problems with corners that a rectgrid (such as is used on a chessboard) imposes. A hexgrid looks like what's shown in Figure 13.1.

Figure 13.1. A hexgrid.

Each hex in the hexgrid can contain terrain of some type: trees, hills, depressions, rivers, lakes, open ground, etc. After much wasted effort trying to computationally define all these terrain elements, I realized my error, an error that is ...