Chris Crawford on Game Design

Adding Mountains, Deserts, and Forests

The next step was to add terrain such as mountains, deserts, and forests. I applied another polygonal algorithm here, defining a polygon that straddled the border between provinces (see Figure 24.3).

Figure 24.3. Building terrain polygons.

This polygonal region would then be randomly spattered with little mountain, forest, or desert icons. The random positioning of these mini-icons masked the purely geometric shape of the algorithm and produced a suitably blotchy look. The end result of all these manipulations looked like Figure 24.4.

Figure 24.4. Final map.