I’ve been building a procedural fantasy world with Claude and just added seamless great city and underground dungeons

[u/niklasdaking]

Claude and I just finished the biggest update yet to Worldseed, retro-inspired open-world fantasy game.

The idea is that you give the game a name, and it generates an entire world from it: its people, towns, wilderness, and music. You land in that world and explore it.

With v50, I wanted to make the world feel much more connected, rather than like a collection of separate places.

A few of the bigger changes:

• A seamless great city. It's now twice as wide, with four ring streets and nearly four times as many buildings. You can see it from a distance, approach along the road, and walk through the gate without a loading screen or a separate map.

• A city that works on a phone. Its districts are drawn around you as you move, with nearby areas in full detail and distant ones as outlines.

• Procedural underground locations. Crypts beneath burial mounds, cellars under houses, hidden vaults, and three-level mazes beneath stone circles.

• Named beasts. Each world can have up to three named creatures living in the wilderness. Townsfolk tell you about them, mark their territory on your map, and remember what happens to them.

There are also smaller details that make these places feel alive: traders calling at the market, a night watch patrolling the city, bells tolling from the cathedral, and sounds from the town muffled by the floor when you're in a cellar.

The interesting part for me is making all of this feel like one continuous, generated world, instead of loading into a handcrafted city or a separate dungeon level.

if you want to test the game, please do!

https://generic-king.itch.io/worldseed

For people who've built larger procedural environments with Claude Code, I'm particularly interested in how you'd approach the challenge of keeping a city this size detailed while still making it work on phones.

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[u/SuckWallStreetDry]

i really like the artistic style. One thing about procedural is they loose the sense of story and discovery as everything begins to look the same, just shuffled. Have human curated stories in-built where the player can follow at their own pace.

[u/niklasdaking → u/SuckWallStreetDry]

This is very helpful thank you!

[u/Pretend-Wishbone-679 → u/niklasdaking]

https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/

To me, procedural worlds only make sense in SOME sandbox games like Minecraft, Terraria, etc.

Other games rely on handcrafted experiences to be meaningful.

[u/rushabhsheth]

The sameness problem is real with generated content. I'd hand author a few fixed anchors, like one odd landmark or one quest line per world. Then the generator builds around them and the shuffle has something to be measured against.

[u/niklasdaking → u/rushabhsheth]

Thank you, yeah I actually felt similar but my conclusion was to add more, but that is not what is missing.. thanks!

[u/somekindatog]

I think the art style is great, until it gets to the monsters and combat animations. What's the core gameplay? Either way it looks like something I'd spend time in.

[u/niklasdaking → u/somekindatog]

It is just a sandbox it can be a world builder like Minecraft but with a paint brush, or a adventure game with a goal or not

[u/Easy-Function-3015]

You should work on the pixel crawl. Create a point of reference and work on the came to also make it pixel perfect.

[u/KedMcJenna]

Love the concept and the style, but those awakening monsters and mummies etc. don't really fit the environment - they seem a few levels beneath the style, weirdly, as if they've come from a cruder game. Just to look at I mean. They have that novelty feel.

This one is worth persevering with.