3D Autotile Wall Building

The game Stronghold Crusader (Firefly Studios, 2002) lets players build complex castles with just a few clicks. Walls and towers are placed at will and connect into a cohesive structure.

For this prototype, my goal was to design a similar system in 3D. You should be able to drag out walls with the mouse. A visual view where the structures are projected onto a two-dimensional plane should make placement easier. On top of that, it should be possible to place buildings like a tower that replaces the wall segments at that spot and blends into the existing structure.

Building a 3D autotile system was especially interesting here. Similar to 2D spritesheets, where a tilemap is automatically extended with new tiles according to defined rules (for example, to hide unsightly corners), the prototype fills in or bevels obtuse angles between walls.

Visually, my goal was to disguise as much as possible the fact that the prototype was built in 3D. The reason for this is that I want to keep exploring, in the future, what advantages and disadvantages 2D and 3D offer in the RTS genre.

In the end, I learned a lot from this prototype about how building modes work in strategy and city-builder games. I also got to familiarize myself with my first pathfinding algorithm, which was necessary for "dragging" the walls.

Going forward, I'll be looking into how to implement a prototype like this using procedural generation. In this system, every wall piece starts out as its own mesh. That means if you place walls on a slope, stairs would inevitably form.