Crafting believable worlds in Chronicles: Medieval

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at how our dev team approaches building settlements in our game. That means anything from small villages to big cities that you, as a player, will get to explore. We’re building a large, immersive world in Chronicles Medieval. And a world like that needs more than open fields and forests. It needs places that draw you in.

The goal was simple - we set out to handcraft beautiful, historically sourced assets and build a system that could take care of their layout and distribution. We leaned heavily on Unreal Engine’s Procedural Content Generation (PCG for short, which allows us to scatter assets that are distributed by a set of variables) and used it to feed our own, proprietary tools.

We knew early on that hand-placing every building across each and every town wouldn’t just slow us down, it would limit us (and deplete our budget quite quickly, too). We’re building a world with scale, variety, and enough ground to get lost in. That meant we needed tools that could support that scope without losing the detail and character that make each location worth visiting.

The procedural generation of villages also can’t be random. It has to follow certain rules to make everything look and feel believable. We also take great pride in creating state-of-the-art environment assets, and we needed everything to be highly art-directable. Putting the art and design teams in control over how the final result looks like.

Over time, our tech artists and tools engineers built a toolkit that’s grown into a full set of internal tools called Skapa, Borg, and Ymir. In short, Skapa allows us to create varied asset compositions that rely on PCG graphs. Ymir is a modular, data-driven tool designed to generate landscapes and biomes procedurally. And Borg is what we use to build settlement layouts. In this post, we’d like to shed some light on how those work together and how you, as a player (and modder!), will benefit from those.

BORG - PROTOTYPE

The development of Borg started years ago. From the very beginning, we knew it was going to be a challenge to populate our huge map with varied, interesting, and organically looking villages or towns.

First, we started researching how medieval villages actually looked like. After studying historical maps and books on the topic, we identified layouts that kept repeating the most. Towns that were settled along a main street. Ones that were more circular, with a marketplace in the center of the settlement. Or ones that were more dispersed and irregular.

Source: Dorftypen nach Robert Mielke, Siedlungskunde des dt. Volkes, München 1927 There’s plenty of historical data that we tried our best to base our generation on. And we wanted our tools to match this data as close as possible, while at the same time also being friendly from a game design point of view - i.e. most important places to visit, those that the player interacts with the most when playing the game (tavern, quartermaster, marketplace etc.), need to be fairly concentrated so that you don’t have to run around too much without any idea what’s where. But what’s really interesting is that this gameplay vision aligns with how medieval settlements were actually built. Historically, towns were built centralized around key institutions that formed the core of the communities day to day lives. That corresponds perfectly with our goals, and we’re able to create organic spaces without compromising core gameplay principles.

After some research and development in Side FX Houdini, our strike team of tech artists, designers