I did another thread before here about design, and so I wanted to continue in the same vein and ask what people thoughts are on something else, but not tied to Terraria. Feel free to answer only one question out of the few that I am posing. The main question is the topic title, but I’m posing some more specific ones as well. Note that this is not a technical question, but a game design one. Technically, the world would not be infinite, but we can think of it like it is.
Context
Imagine that there was a game in the same genre as Terraria, and is also 2D. Unlike Terraria, this game has a world that is infinite in all directions.
Let’s limit this to say that when you play this hypothetical game, that you are expected to play on only one world (similar to Terraria, if you added that all possible biomes and world gen features were in one world, and that you can’t bring characters to other worlds).
How would the game be designed to accommodate the world being infinite like this?
Questions
In most of these 2d sandbox kind of games, we have the surface, which is usually where you spawn, below you have some caves and underground biomes.
What would go above the surface in such a world? Is there a reason to believe that it should not be infinite?
What would go below in that world? Or should it always end with a bedrock type situation where there is a bottom that is easily reached?
For left/right, the expectation is that you will eventually see a biome that you already saw, maybe there’s some differentiation, like difficulty of enemies, weather etc?
How would it work if you wanted to gate progression like Tru3thful mentioned in the last thread?
i wanted to do an actual reply, but i have broken and also there is a lot to write and am lazy so there is my draft insted. It can give you some ideas
if Terraria would be designed with infinite world, it would need MC’s chunk system, where only explored chunks stored data, other ones are created via loading them on screen with seed. The reason is both performance and data. Infinite worlds without encrypting = infinite bytes of storage, which no one has
there are 2 options. Either bedrock or an infinite underworld. It would generate in layers, but those layers are inconsistent, falling down and rising up.
Btw to be clear, I’m not using Terraria as the subject here, it’s just a point of comparison. I’m thinking of if you made a completely new game that had an infinite world in all directions, it seems like up/down are the ones that don’t immediately come to mind when I think about games that have them.
The second one is somewhat like caves but in the style of an underworld? I wonder if both options would just be boring if you know that going down results in just the same biome as the one you are already in?
i mean you can technically make an infinite biome generator but that is way too hard to code
also yea, they are boring, but lets just take MC end for example. It is important to explore that for an elytras BUT it becomes really boring, really soon. And maybe thats the point. Maybe make like abyss biome which rarely generates some really op endgame stuff, and its entire point to be empty and dangerous, with some powerful enough mobs to deal with until you run out of food or healing potions, which you cant replenish there
Well this thread is not about the technical details, but you could easily generate the biome endlessly if you used a chunks system.
Quite possibly, but you would eventually run out of a reason to explore. Maybe the op stuff uses a material as ammo or something that can be found only in this biome, and then the depth that you travel in the biome increases the density of the material found in that area but scaling up enemies / dangers. At least then there is risk/reward in going deeper, and at some point going deeper is quicker than going laterally.
We are trying to assume that we create 2d side-view (not top view) game (like Terraria) with infinite world generation. And we are trying to deal with those problems
in that case, a good solution would likely be (assuming it’s also infinite vertically) going up, you’d make a sort of ‘space’ area, and have the game ‘generate’ asteroids, stars, planets, etc as you go up, essentially providing infinite ‘up’ room.
Going down is a lot more difficult, but just having one definite ‘layer’ with different types of biomes/generation would create variety, while fixing problems.
Going side to side, just having lots of different biomes could fix this.
Also, if you wanted to gate progression to space or a certain biome, one could simply make that biome have some sort of hostile condition/weather that renders the player unable to enter or make progress until a certain challenge has been surmounted, either disabling the condition entirely or unlocking a way to deal with the condition.
But then, what is a “planet” in this case? Is it just another version of where you were before you went into space? So then there would be a gap between the starting area “planet” and other ones below/left/right/above? If you dropped water off the edge of one planet does it fall until it reaches another?
There would be floating islands, maybe a few planetoids but it will probably be like Minecraft, where there is a certain build height and a certain part of the sky only loaded in at once.
If I were to say, maybe another dimension like the terraria Aether biome (but a dimension, and its weird because its flipped upside down and the wildlife has adapted to the world being upside down, so trees and stuff are strange)
The difficulty would increase the further you went out, as a way to discourage players from loading so many chunks that will make the world size too big; the size will be a typical large world but you can also load excess chunks.
The system would be the same as question 3, it would discourage players from traveling out farther and loading more chunks by increasing the difficulty the farther you go out.
Note: there are probably a LOT of flaws in this idea, and I’d be happy to answer any questions and improve on any potential oversights.
So the base world is infinitely wide and deep, but above that are smaller blobs of worlds?
Is there a reason why you think there should be a limit?
How far would that be? Past the point where each biome has come up at least once?
In reference to last one, how does that interact? Are you saying that the biomes that contribute to further points in progression themselves are naturally harder or that you need to go further out to the 2nd or 3rd etc repetition of a biome, which will be more difficult, to find certain things there?
id say infinite height would definitely warrant more expansion on sky islands and the underworld. id say the underworld is easier to tackle with this problem then with the sky islands. with the underworld, youcan just expand the ash hellstone and buildings, etc. but there, if you expand the sky, it just adds more blank space. it could add a bigger aspect to the sky, as its kinda bland compared to an area like say, the jungle.
also, the map would be an issue. in mc, the issues answer was to make it so the “map” was limited or something like that. Id say the fullscreen map (FSMAP for short) would need to not extend past where you explored.
also, there could even be multiple lizard temples, like what they do in minecraft with the (wdycall those things with teh end portals??? sanctuaries???).
also if the underworld would be extended, it would be SUPER COOL to have them be like a cave, so its like the cavern, but with ash and hellstone. and some obsidian houses, and somehow, a motive to keep revisiting the area would make it feel amazing.
the sky on the other hand could use something like the dungeon or something idk. im thinking themed like Olympus (greek gods area)
