I just backed my first Kickstarter project, ‘Sir, You Are Being Hunted’:

Survival and stealth in a procedurally-generated world! Sir, You Are Being Hunted is tweedpunk robo-horror from Big Robot Games.

I think the environments look amazing already, and if they develop the strategy element so I can play as I like (more stealth and caution than reliance on sharpshooting skills and lightning reactions) then I’m sure I’ll get my money’s worth! They’re already raised £72,790, bypassing their minimum goal of £40,000, so now I just have my fingers crossed that they reach their final stretch goal of £80,000 so they’ll include a multiplayer mode.

Here’s a gameplay video:

Thanks to Steve for the heads up.

Further reading

The notion that captured our imagination, and focused our decision-making, was the idea of AI hunting a player. Sir is founded on this idea. The title tells you everything. We loved the feeling of being on the back-foot in games: fleeing as much as fighting, knowing that escape, rather than victory in combat, was the true goal. The fear from being vulnerable. Mix this with a strong stew of British sci-fi and our indigenous terrain and accompanying folklore – moorland, tweed, robots, pheasants, rain, poachers, hunters, hounds, horror – and we had a heady mix. We couldn’t resist plunging into it.

An Essay About Sir, You Are Being Hunted, Kickstarter – rockpapershotgun.com

I’ve worked on a number of procedural world generation tools before, but this particular engine is unique in that the intention was to generate a vision of “British countryside”, or an approximation thereof. To approach this we identified a number of features in the countryside that typify the aesthetic we wanted, and seem to be quintessential in British rural environments. Possibly the most important element is the ‘patchwork quilt’ arrangement of agricultural land, where polygonal fields are divided by drystone walls and hedgerows. These form recognisable patterns that gently rise and fall across the rolling open countryside, enclosing crops, meadows, livestock and woodlands. This patchwork of different environmental textures is something that is very stereotypically part of the British landscape. I looked for a mathematical equivalent we could use to simulate this effect and quite quickly decided upon using Voronoi diagrams.

If I May Speak Procedurally, Sir: Building The British Countryside Generator – big-robot.com