Water that moves
Lakes lie flat, rivers come in from the edge and run downhill, falls come off the mountains, and the water you look at is see-through and moving.
Until this week the water in Groundwork looked like a blue painted mountain. It was the same flat, matte top as the grass, only blue and a little lower, and it kept the height of every terrace it lay on, so a river walked down a hill in blue steps with blue walls. It did not move. Nothing about it said water.
So I set some rules first. All still water lies at one level, though a lake can be deeper in the middle. A river never starts somewhere in a field: it comes in from the edge of the map, and it only runs downhill, round high ground instead of through it. The only waterfalls are where a river comes off a mountain.
Then the look. I made a few previews in the browser and threw most of them away. A smooth, soft water was pretty, but it did not fit the game, so the water is now drawn in the same pixels as the ground. You see the sandy bed through it, and over it drifts a net of ripple lines a shade lighter than the water, with short bits of them catching the light. On a river the net slides downstream. Sun patches drift across the lake, small sparkles come and go, and a thin lighter line marks the bank. At the foot of a fall the water churns white and spray flies up.
The first rivers came out of the generator as canals: straight runs on the grid, right-angle zigzags, two channels side by side, and a river that stopped for a tile and went on again. I rewrote it so a river is first traced as a smooth curve and only then laid onto the tiles, two to four tiles wide, so it bends the way a river bends. The video is from that second try.
