Building New Worlds

I recently picked up Blame! and was fascinated by its setup. The first volume is pretty much just an introduction to its Sci-Fi world.

As I was going though the pages and all the illustrations it made me think about how an author goes about creating a world. When I used to be an RPG master and come up with quests I always had this clear picture of how the characters could proceed through an adventure. That is a lot easier then designing entire worlds. You navigate this small portion you have in mind as you go through the story but you know it's limited. On the other hand I find it hard to wrap my head around entire worlds (or universes in certain cases, Sanderson anyone?).

Since you have to start somewhere I imagine one could set up the rules that this world abides to. I realize now that I was doing it implicitly during the quest creation. If I were to write those rules down it would have been simpler to make sure any subsequent story could comply and seamlessly fit into this fictional world. But if I could only work within the boundaries of this world, how much variance could I get in each adventure? How soon would I stumble upon a repeating pattern that would bring uninteresting repetition?

If your rules are too strict and confining, there's only so much you can do. If you can just jump up and down on a surface, you are limited to two states (down and up temporarily) and one action (jump). Pretty boring world! But as you add more rules you actually add more freedom and unique combinations. A lot of this sounds like it can be done by a computer and procedural generation of entire worlds has been a thing in the video-game industry for a while now. Generally speaking we automated the role of an Architect limiting their responsibility to defining the rules of a world/universe.

Thoughts

I'd like to explore some low level procedural generation in Go, I just want to get an idea of what challenges one can face.

I thought about this problem backwards (?). If adding rules (and I realize now that it's not really a rule but a degree of freedom) increases the space of possible solutions, taking a degree of freedom away will limit how you move through this world. This applies to decision making! As I was going over the basics of Software Architecture the other day, it boils down to a chain of decisions. We defined 4 pillars or 4 degrees of freedom and the combination of them all can sum up to a lot of possibilities (yes I know, there's a formula for this but I'm just thinking out loud). That can be overwhelming but if you can "lock" one of those pillars, suddenly the space in which you can move shrinks dramatically.

So when faced with these type of decisions it is helpful to define the degrees of freedom in which you operate. Can you remove any of them by either making a decision or spotting a constraint? Keep doing so until you either come to a final decision/solution or realize that you locked yourself out! If that's the case you might have to go back and revisit your journey, but don't go backwards only, jump around the many degrees of freedom and learn which one unlocks you.