nic

game? designer??

  • they/them

various credits on:
The Banished Vault
Arcsmith
John Wick Hex
Quarantine Circular
Subsurface Circular
Vienna Automobile Society
Sun Dogs

 

P&P microgames:
In the Court of the Skeleton King
The Garden
Tallships

 
Chicago


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in reply to @nic's post:

Oh those are good too but I actually completely mistyped, I meant “infinite order apeirogonal tiling”. It’s fixed now lol

They’re similar enough words but they mean completely different things. Guess my brain is too tired for that right now though huh :P

Let me introduce you to The Joy Of Hex.

The thing I like about hex grids is they have no corner cases. You just handle moving from one tile to another across a singe edge, and that's it. There's no "diagonal" movement to deal with like square grids.

Obvious downsides - a lot of human architecture likes to have right angles, and they're tricky (though not impossible) to model.

OK not technically true for 3D stacks, since they still have diagonal up/down moves to handle. I did briefly think about moving to having vertical layers offset something like face-centered-cubic, but it made my head hurt, so eh OK there are still some corner cases I guess.

You also need to decide if things like roads and walls travel from hex-center-to-center, or if they follow hex edges. Personally I like both to go from center-to-center (which means a road is stored as a data member per EDGE, not per HEX), but it depends on what your game is trying to model.

For coordinate systems - it's still just 2 dimensions, but they're a little odd because there's implicitly three values, but like barycentric coordinates the third is implicit. You'll get used to them.

The real authority on hex grids is Amit at Red Blob Games, who has some amazing resources on using them: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

I love hex grids! I’ve worked with them a lot so Amit’s blogged feels tattooed onto my eyelids. In particular I’m interested in doing interesting things with square grids because of architecture specifically, but still trying to have some variety. The Townscaper method is cool but not quite what I’m after.

I’ve long wanted to do something with hex-as-cubes and play with height, I need to think about it more

I have a hex-based game, and I keep thinking about making some tiles for right-angled walls. So one set of walls - very simple, just along the line of hexes. The other set of walls in gameplay terms snakes along a wiggly line, but graphically the walls are rendered straight. Honestly it should work fine :-)