Age of Frontiers: built to be modded

Remember when I said, in the first look at Age of Frontiers, that its interface was extremely moddable? That was only the beginning. Age of Frontiers is being built to be fully moddable: the world, its goods, units, factions, sites and almost every rule live in data files, not in the code. And to make adding new assets and maps easier, the game comes with its own tools.

Maps from Tiled

The overland is not drawn inside the game. It is made with Tiled, a free and popular map editor, and then imported into Age of Frontiers: each layer of the Tiled map becomes part of the overland, from the background and the base tiles to the terrain and the movement rules.

But the imported map is only the skeleton. One of its layers marks which parts are left to chance, and when a new game starts, every one of those big hexes expands into a patch of smaller tiles, following a set of rules that anyone can customise: a forest tends to grow more forest, light woods or swamp, while mountains only rarely appear out of nowhere... All of it comes from a seed, so the same seed always gives you the same world, and every new one a different land that is still recognisably Calima.

The Overland Tool lets you see the result straight away: pick a seed, a time of day and a weather, load your own atlas, layout and tiles, and reload.

The Overland Tool of Age of Frontiers: a lake winding through grassland and hills at dawn, with the seed, time, weather, atlas, layout and tiles settings on the right

Portraits and bodies

Units have their own look too, and it is just as customisable. A portrait can be a single image, or it can be layered from parts: face, expression, nose, marks, hair, beard, moustache and accessories, plus the colours of the skin, hair, eyes and accessories. The same goes for the figure of the unit's body and hair, and for the faction sigil next to it.

The Portrait Tool of Age of Frontiers: sliders for face, expression, nose, mark, hair, beard, mustache and accessory, colour palettes for skin, hair, eyes and accessories, figure body, figure hair and sigil, and the resulting portrait of a red-haired hero with a red helmet sigil

And the parts don't have to be picked one by one: each faction, or each kind of unit, can have its own rules, with a chance for every part and colour. That way a crafter recruit looks like a crafter, but no two of them look quite the same. If you'd rather draw your own characters, just drop in your images and use them as they are.

There is still a lot to do before anyone else can mod the game comfortably, but the foundations are there. I'll keep you posted!

Om