A Woodsman is a minimalist exploration game. A world is created for your relaxed exploration. While you slowly uncover the world you will discover interesting places and structures. You will also come across increasingly foreign cultures with alphabets you must decipher to before you can interact with them. When you know more, the towns will offer ways to help you explore further and find more discoveries.
A Woodsman finds its roots my love of exploration. One of my favourite games growing up was Uncharted Waters : New Horizons. However despite trying, I had a best, only vaguely enjoyed exploring in more recent games. Building off a much older idea of mine I decided to have a go at trying to capture that sense of exploration in my own game.
Although visually pretty rudimentary (partly as a stylistic choice, partly because… well… there is a reason I am paid to write software rather than draw), there were a number of technical achievements in the game. The first was the world generation. I applied two limits: the world must seem natural and sensible (go upstream, and you’ll find a mountain or villages) and it must generate VERY fast (since it was on tablets and no one wants to wait for a game to start). It was the first proper world generation that I had done. One of my favourite bits was a bug that I didn’t know was there (the worlds looked OK) until I investigated a single tile that seemed wrong, discovered a value was off, fixed it and suddenly the worlds were pretty! Since it is an exploration game, I also needed the worlds to have some size to them. To deal with that there is a world streaming system, which I had never done before. Lastly for several reasons I decided to reboot my engine. This gave me a chance to drastically improve it with what I had learned over the preceding five or six years. Probably the biggest change was to make it fully concurrent which resulted in my developing a knack for threading (and fixing corresponding bugs…).
August Junkala 