Ardarium

Ardarium is a 2D simulation that automatically generates a random map and populates it with people who then attempt to survive and build nations. The point is to be something pretty and colorful that you can watch like a screensaver or play like a simple sandbox game.

People gather food, avoid danger, fight or run from enemies, build settlements, start farming, mate and have kids who then grow up and live their own lives. A settlement might thrive due to an abundance of food and then decline because of starvation and disease caused by overpopulation.

The world constantly changes. Land deforms slowly because of erosion and tectonic uplift, or quickly because of volcanos and meteors. Elevation changes cause coastlines to shift and alter weather patterns. These in turn impact where forests and crops can grow and ultimately where people can live. One volcanic eruption could spell doom for a nation even if they survive the explosion simply because it changes the landscape. A lush forest might turn into a parched desert because it no longer gets rain. Part of the seabed can become an island if an earthquake lifts its tectonic plate above the water.

The sun rises and sets with a 24-hour day-night cycle. The moon has realistic monthly phases. Ambient temperature changes with the seasons as the calendar moves through a 360-day year. The hemisphere can be Northern or Southern, which matters for the order of the seasons, the direction storms rotate due to the Coriolis affect, and the direction of the poles. Northern hemisphere maps are cold in the north and Southern hemisphere maps are cold in the south.

If you want you can turn the entire map into a glacier by raising the sea level and keeping the sun down until everything freezes. You can choose to help a certain nation grow or you can smite everyone with volcanos. And no matter how bad the destruction, the land will recover, forests will return, and new people will settle the land.

Anything the player can do, like placing new people or starting apocalyptic meteor showers, is something the simulation also does automatically. You can leave it running as long as you want and the sun keeps rising and setting, seasons keep changing, people keep living their lives, and nations continue to rise and fall.