Trigger Happy
Genesis
In a dance of fire are new worlds born. At British videogame developers Core Design, they have a special, home-grown software tool designed exactly for the purpose of building new worlds: it’s called, not inappropriately, Worldbuild II. After the artists have drawn hundreds of pencil sketches of imaginary landscapes, the topographical features of each area are fed directly into the computer. Acetate plans go up on the walls. Now begins the process of making it an explorable environment.
As in many things, ontogeny (the development of an individual) recapitulates or mirrors phylogeny (the evolution of a type). At its early stages, the human fetus bears certain physiological resemblances to our fishy ancestors. And in the early stages of gestation of a modern virtual world, it resembles the cutting-edge arcade games of two decades ago: the pure, abstract geometry of Battlezone. The digitally created “land” is a wireframe model made up of hundreds or thousands of polygons; the worldbuilder simply has to drag individual bits up or down with the mouse to create the shapes of what will become molehills, mountains,
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