Michael K. Walker Game Design

To begin with, I created a simple hexagon grid using a cubic coordinate system, and constructed the world in four steps. First, the world consists only of water, in the correct size and shape of the map. Next, continent points are picked and raised out of the ocean.  Where these miniature continents overlap, hills and mountains are formed.

With the majority of landmasses out of the water, I set a noise filter on the entire world, randomly altering the heights of tiles to create irregularities in the terrain. Finally, a second noise filter adds a "moisture" value that determines if a tile is a plains, grassland, or desert.

After creating a landmass, I created a number of Kingdoms - entities that contain a number of cities. Pulling from external data files, such as the example above, I used string replacement to dynamically insert unique names into a list of events and descriptors. These descriptors are chosen based off a weighted random roll. Kingdoms and cities are tagged with values that influence the likelyhood that they will pull from certain files. 

As an example, a pacifist Kingdom is very unlikely to roll events related to expansion or invading neighbors, while a magically powerful Kingdom is unlikely to go on a witch hunt. After Kingdoms and cities are initially tagged, they are placed on the map, where they gather data about their surroundings. Small tweaks are made, such as references to forests or mountains if a city is near either.