Hi there!
I’m trying to figure out a way to implement a hex tiled map that renders a Galaxy. The Galaxy needs to have terrain features like nebulae, arms and core with different properties.
I’m currently using a texture as background and a mask to tell the grid which tiles are playable.
The problem I’m facing now is that I’d like to have those tiles work like terrains (giving debuffs to movement speed in the center of the Galaxy tiles or reduced line of sight in nebulaes)
How can I make it visually interesting and inform the player about the terrain features each tile has? (Art-wise)
Is your viewpoint topdown, isometric, or 1st person?
Camera is looking top down with a rotation of 30 degrees
I’m new to Unity, so there’s probably a better way to do it, but I’m working on the early stages of a strategy game at the moment and the way I’m doing it is having scriptable objects holding tile info, and a 2d array holding the model of the map (which is then used to populate the Tilemap). You can get info from the array when needed.
But like I say, I’m a newbie so keen to see what others suggest.
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Reasonable enough idea would be to have two different views of the galaxy. The first one which is supposed to be “realistic” and where you can roughly guess effects of a tile by its visuals.
And the second one would be “strategic view” where tiles are displayed schematically as a grid, and grid color represents its effects.
In both cases effects of a tile should be visible when a player mouse over it.
At least that’s how I would do it.
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Those are some interesting ideas. How would to go about creating those visuals?
You can take a look at X4 galaxy map for inspiration or at other galactic 4x games. Most do not use hex tiles for galaxy map, but use them for other regions.
I’d use naked hex grid and for example, could introduce “visibility mode” where each cell is colored differently based on how much it obscures the view. 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. And I’d use a gray gradient for that. You can also indicate visibility with stripe pattern, etc.
Not that I prefer Tron/Rez style cyberpunkish visuals, so I’m not the person to ask if you want things to look artistically pretty with a lot of detail.
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