Procedural Coats of Arms, Part 2 news

I’m afraid this week’s update is only a short one, though in keeping with my 2014 goal of weekly blog updates I decided to post this one anyway. I’ve been mostly busy this week with finishing the first draft of my doctorate (now a mere 30k words and editing remaining before the end of February) but have been working on some of the coats of arms which aren’t made of a single large icon, but might put together a number of smaller ones.

Here are two examples of the four-icon variation, which are either separated by a cross down the middle, or into four corners of different colours. There is currently a database of thirty different small icons (eight of which you see below), and once I started assigning coats of arms to families it will be impossible for the same icon to be used multiple times in the same playthrough. I’d like to finish up with a database of maybe fifty or so small icons.

Also, as you can see I’ve now added a banner for house mottos! For houses with a shield that has a single large icon (like the ones we saw last week) there will be a number of preset ones that are occasionally used, but generally all coats of arms will generate mottos anew. I’m not sure if I’ll be working on mottos next or on coats of arms that have icons that take up half the shield – like the top half, or the left half, or similar – but either way next week’s update will probably be more on coats of arms. I anticipate either a week or two until all the graphics and mottos for these are generated, so one or two more entries, then I’ll be moving onto generating family trees and traits for families, and then assigning the player one at the start of the game based on what civ they decide to start in. Stay tuned…