My First Experiment took the form of a Scenario Editor from Age of Empires II. I was recently playing the game and noticed the similarities between Fir/Pine/Evergreen trees and the Pine Forest models in the game, so decided to perform a series of tests using the game. The game is a Real Time Strategy (RTS), the main focus is to acquire resources, these include lumber gained from chopping down trees and use these resources to construct buildings, grow your armies and eventually destroy your enemies or become the premier civilisation. I decided to attempt a few tests focused on the acquisition of the lumber resource because it involved the cutting down of ‘Fir’trees, not sure where I would end up.
The scenario editor allows a lot of freedom when it comes to creating maps and my first test involved a single unit and a single building, a villager and a lumber camp. The villagers are the only unit able to chop and harvest wood and so were my main military units against the army of trees I covered the map with. However, the lonely villager, even with the game running at a fast rate would’ve taken hours to completely deforest the map, leading to progressive tests in which increasingly large numbers of villagers were placed in order to better cut down the horde of trees before them. As this developed, computer AI were also added and more elaborate placements and minimised tree density and shapes were implemented in order to speed up the logging process and also to create a cleaner one screen image for the video I intended to show, as this remained the best way to show my progress. Eventually a one screen image was created, a large forest of trees that was surrounded by an army of eager choppers, easily reachable lumber camps for storing the wood and with a single purpose in mind, the destruction of the trees in front of them.
Link available when link uploads.
The video, which is less tedious to watch when sped up, shows the villagers the main damage dealers in the game and their AI counterparts, attacking the trees. This was mentioned as a game that deals mainly with warring economies and armies was essentially downgraded into a logging simulator with no military units on the map. Also of note is the AI’s interaction with the game world, the AI was set to Easy Difficulty, meaning they would rarely take aggressive action and were slow in their advancement. This made their use of the lumber in a similar way to mine understandable, but where I had that in mind, their mindless following of the basics of the game perhaps could lend itself to being exploited or in the case of upping the difficulty, posing challenged for further exploration. I also begun again to think about the myths and legends associated with the Norse mythology and their use of Fir trees, again thinking about the possibility of creating a story within a game. This led me to other game world editors in order to discover if this was possible.