Today I released Cartographer CLI v1.0.0-demo, the first game from my independent studio, Immersed Fractal Labs.
I've been working on it for approximately five months, and it's finally out in the wild.
Cartographer started with procedural world generation. I wanted to create worlds that weren't just maps to look at, but environments that could change, develop, and respond to outside influences.
Eventually, that experiment became a god game.
The premise is simple: You're given a world. What happens to it is partly up to you.
Each game generates a 25×25 world containing different terrain, elevations, resources, and civilizations.
Those civilizations have populations, believers, and approval ratings. They respond to their environments, experience events, and change as turns pass.
You can intervene.
Bless a civilization. Influence its beliefs. Heal its population. Change the terrain. Alter environmental conditions. Or simply observe what happens without interfering.
As you gain experience, additional abilities become available, giving you more ways to influence the simulation.
There's no elaborate graphical interface. Cartographer runs entirely in the terminal, using text and Unicode symbols to represent the world.
I grew up enjoying games that gave players systems to experiment with rather than prescribing exactly how they should play. Cartographer is my attempt to explore that kind of design through procedural generation and simulation.
What's in the demo?
- Procedurally generated worlds
- Civilizations with population, belief, and approval systems
- Terrain and environmental simulation
- Random events that affect the world
- Unlockable abilities for influencing civilizations and reshaping terrain
- Multiple cartographic overlays for examining world properties
- Turn-based simulation
It's written in C++17, with builds available for Windows and Linux.
Cartographer CLI is free to download, with an optional pay-what-you-want contribution.
🎮 Play it here:
https://immersed-fractal-labs.itch.io/cartographer-cli
🔬 Immersed Fractal Labs:
https://immersedfractal.com
This is my first publicly released game under IF Labs, and I'm looking forward to seeing what other people do with the systems I've built.
If you give it a try, I'd especially appreciate feedback on the simulation, the abilities, and how understandable the terminal interface feels to someone encountering it for the first time.
Thanks for checking it out!