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Comment by michaelwm | Hacker News Reader

Amit was an instrumental part in the development of one of my favorite video games, Realm of the Mad God. It was a masterpiece of the Flash game genre, and its guild feature introduced me to many lifelong friends.

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RotMG has a great idea that I wish more games would copy: difficulty scales with elevation. If you want to take it easy, stick to the coasts. If you want a challenge, strike inland towards the mountains (or follow a river upstream). It's a great way of intuitively expressing difficulty ranges across a sprawling world map, and I remember being disappointed the first time that I played Skyrim that it didn't seem to do the same.

For posterity, here's Amit on map generation: https://simblob.blogspot.com/2010/01/simple-map-generation.h...

Doesn’t Ark kinda do this, except with elevation, it becomes more difficult the more inland you travel.

BTW the newer RotMG maps are based on this http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

One of the map design goals in RotMG was that players could start playing solo on the coasts, and then as they moved up towards the mountains, the area would shrink so they would be more likely to meet each other. However, when we added teleportation the "forcing function" wasn't needed anymore. Players naturally wanted to play with each other. Also, a lot more players were high level so we needed more mountain land and less coastal land. For https://gasgame.net/ we're using a different design, where south is easier and north is harder. Relative to RotMG's map it shrinks the beginner areas and expands the veteran areas.

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