Hex Map Generator

Published on July 01, 2025

My image

Me and Jasper have been taking part in another game jam! This time, it was this jam that we took part in: Jam Link, a ten day long game jam hosted by 8 bits to infinity. They host game jams several times per year, and this one was their 47th jam in total. This was the first time that I took part in one of their jams, although I’ve been wanting to for quite a while. I am still regretful about missing the 8bit jam, and I’ve been meaning to backtrack through the previous jams and playtest previous winners sometime.

Anyway, I had wanted to make some sort of civ-like game for quite a while in order to go deeper into hexagonal maps. During my time with Short Circuit Studios, I implemented the hexagonal maps into “Teeny Tiny Towns”, and thought it was a lot of fun. I thought, I should make something myself with what I learned there. An idea I had had for a while, is a map you “build” yourself by placing hexagonal cards on preplaced tiles. I’ve rerolled this idea several times in my mind, balling with my friends who like turn-based strategy games. When this gamejam came around, I thought it a good opportunity to make a prototype in order to see what I might prefer.

I obviously had to make it speedrunnable, and the theme was “Nature”, so the idea was to make a game where you have to make druids, and you have to compete against other civilizations in order to settle a set amount of druid circles. A forest circle, a desert circle, a swamp circle, a tundra circle and a jungle circle. And I ended up making all the locations necessary (except for swamps, because I didn’t have time to implement rivers), as well as the majority of the UI. I also had the units, the production cycle and I had other civs. However, since I didn’t have time to implement the resources and the enemy AI, and I felt too stressed to figure out what to do to still make the loop work, I ended up only handing in a map generator. So obviously, we won’t win. We didn’t meet any of the requirements!

I have more things to say about the game I had planned out, but first, here is the link to the generator: Da Linky

Now, this “civclone” game is a fairly shameless copy of civ 6, mixed with elements from Crusader Kings, Stellaris and other similar games. My idea was also to assemble more reusable code I could use for my “Aleastory” project, which would be using a lot of the same things.