Chris Crawford on Game Design

Designing the World

My first task was to create a world. I had already decided that, like Empire, my game would create its own custom world for each playing. I anticipated that this could create a nasty problem. My world-creation algorithms would be quite complex and could conceivably create nonsensical worlds. In such cases, I would need to re-create the nonsensical world and track down the programming bug that led to the mistake. Yet, if the algorithms relied on random numbers to create the world, then I would have no way to re-create the world. I solved the problem by asking the user to provide a name for the world; this name became the seed for the random number generator, guaranteeing repeatable results should they be required.

LESSON 66 ...