Hey everyone 
I want to build a game in my free time. It can take years, it doesnt matter.
While I have some knowledge in education in Game Design and Development, I am not good enough to call myself a Game Developer.
My first goal in my game design is to create a planet, which starts as a proto planet (a very lot of lava and so on) and turn it into a habitable planet as we know it from Earth.
That means:
- The planet is a massive stone ball at start, there is a lot of lava and stuff like that.
- A massive continent (pangea) starts to develop, surroundet by ocean.
All of this should be visible in real time, the player can watch the progress.
Now the tough part:
- At the end, I want this world to be used as the map of a strategy game.
- There should be no tiles, but a large map without any restrictions.
- The player can zoom in and out from far to very close view.
- The map should stay changeable. During the progress of the game I
want the pangäa continent to split itself into continents, similar to what happened on Earth long ago. - All of this needs to happen in a procedual way, so the map is different with each new game the player starts. It also allows the player to impact the creation of the map much better then just selecting a map type as we know it from current strategy games.
So I know this is a very oversized base for a game, but I hope that all of this is somehow possible. My question is not how to exactly create this but I need some thoughts about the possible ways I can go to achieve these goals.
My first attempt would be to create a 3D sphere (the planet) and modify it with random noise textures, but this would be hard to control. Bad point two is that it results in a very high resolution texture, as I want the map to be playable in a very close view.
Maybe there are some more ideas out there.
Kind regards
Toby