Hello there, community!
Today, we wanted to introduce you to Instant Terra: a fantastic software we have partnered with and used to help us bring life to Semisus, developed by Wysilab.
Its purpose is to procedurally generate a great diversity of terrains and geographies following rules and parameters established by us.
It is an incredibly robust and powerful tool that can deliver exactly what we need for Profane's dynamism. It allows us to create precisely the world we imagine in a high-quality and procedural way.
Semisus will be home to various biomes, with a plethora of fauna and flora, and Instant Terra has been a strong ally in helping us forge this world with ease and practicality.
Since Profane will feature a single-shard world, we need this world to dynamically adapt to our needs, quickly generating or shrinking regions.
We have been working with it for a little over a year now, and it took us some time to study and learn the best ways to apply its features to what we need for Profane. Since Instant Terra can achieve many different results for many different styles, which aren't all necessarily what we are looking for, we have to optimize this process. Nevertheless, this study has shown us that we will achieve even more than expected. Furthermore, it will save us quite some time in the future because of its ability to procedurally generate unique terrains and landscapes.
We've talked with our Technical Artists to understand how their experience with Instant Terra has been, and they were delighted with it. First of all, they reported that it's very user-friendly, especially to those seeking a self-taught approach, as it has straightforward and easy-to-understand features that encourage exploration and experimentation. This is important because there aren't many tutorials out there yet.
The software is also very stable, which is vital because it can get very demanding when dealing with large masses of terrain and compute all the different parameters when generating a new landscape with a click.
Our main challenge with the tool, so far, was to integrate it with Unity (we did it!) and to flatten its learning curve so the rest of the team can make use of it without having to learn all about it, focusing on what's essential for the creation of Semisus. This took quite some time and a lot of work from our Head of Tech Art, Rodolfo Calabrezi, and we are very proud of it!
After these steps, Rodolfo has entrusted Thomaz Nardelli with continuing this work, which includes making all of this work in conjunction with our water/river system, so that any stream of water is in sync with the terrain created, giving life to a beautiful landscape. Thomaz has been enjoying this work with Instant Terra because it's not only technical but artistic as well (which we expect from Technical Artists, right? Hehe), as it shapes the world of Profane. His biggest compliment to the software is that "it does not get in the way of what I want to do. On the contrary, it gives me all the tools I need and encourages me to use them in any way I want."
We still have much to learn about it. Still, we are extremely satisfied with what we have accomplished so far and with the potential Instant Terra has to give us exactly what we need: a quick way to build beautiful regions for our players and able to keep up with the dynamic game we are creating. For Alpha, we are focused on tropical regions, but we can't wait to create all the other extraordinary environments you will see in Profane in the future.
