Losing My Sanity!

What's going on everyone!?

Today for the #2019gameaday challenge I decided to play Cthulu Realms for the first time in a long time.

It's not that it's been so long because I dont like the game, it's more that I dont understand the game in its entirety as easily as I would like to. 

So because of this I decided to play the easy AI. In the beginning of the game I was honestly getting my butt kicked and my heath got really low at one point. 

Then out of seemingly nowhere I started understanding the game and doing better, lol!

So much so that I actually won the match! Now, I know the game went on longer than a normal play session but winning is winning and I won, lol!

As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)

-Tim

Square Tiling Of A Sphere, Part 1/3

I almost always work on 2D game maps, but occasionally I get intrigued by planetary maps. I'd like to make a planet that uses a grid. The topology of a sphere requires a few things:

1. Moving east or west you eventually wrap around the world → easy
2. Moving north/south you eventually reach a pole, and then all directions are south/north → medium
3. Wrapping around the world east/west is shorter near the poles than near the equator → hard

Some grid games like Civilization will let you wrap east/west but not north/south. That acts like a cylinder, not a sphere. And some grid games will let you wrap north/south just like you wrap east/west. That acts like a torus, not a sphere. A tile grid game that acts like a sphere is hard!

A few years ago I played with hexagons covering a sphere. The main idea was that although there are some pentagons scattered around, we can hide them by making the map generator produce impassable terrain (deep oceans, inaccessible mountains, lava, etc.) in those areas, so you can never get close to the pentagons. Also, we have to divide the planet into regions that get shuffled around as you move around. While I was working on that I found some other things I wanted to try, but I didn't try them right away. Why?

I have three kinds of projects:

1. My "main" projects (hexagonal grids, pathfinding, etc.) are about making high quality explanations. I'll spend a lot of time on these. I usually understand the topic reasonably well.
2. My "gamejam" projects like this one are about exploring new things. I'll spend a limited amount of time (hour, day, or week) on these. I usually don't understand the topic that well.
3. My "art" projects are about making something that looks cool.

Since I limit my time on each of the "gamejam" style projects (marked with an /x/ in the URL), once I run out of time, I'll stop, and make a list of things I want to explore later. For the hexagons-on-a-sphere project, I wanted to try squares-on-a-sphere, but didn't have time. I decided to explore that topic last week. I started with HEALPix, a layout used by NASA for placing quadrilaterals on a sphere, but I concluded that it's overkill for my needs. NASA also has the COBE quadrilateralized cube, and there are several other layouts to try. But I'm out of time, so those will be in a future "gamejam" style project. As often happens, I realize towards the end that I should've read more papers first, but sometimes I don't know what to look for until after I've tried implementing something.

Read about covering a sphere in square tiles