In this episode of Blue Tengu’s Game Development Show, we continue working where we left off with the hex grid for our world map. As mentioned in a previous post, we tried out a quick fill the world with random tiles approach, even making it more efficient by localizing it near the player, but, as expected, the results weren’t nearly natural enough. So we decided to go with a new approach, which is to drop “seed islands” onto the map, which could expand out into full-sized islands (mirroring Mother Nature in the process).
In this episode, we start out by dropping a single seed hex tile down, which we expand out in 6 directions. Then, with the basic size determined, we work to fill in the gaps with land tiles and eventually try morphing those tiles to random ones (like trees, mountains, open ground, etc.) just to get it playable. In the coming weeks, we’ll start laying down better rules for determining how these islands evolve – including whether we try to start from an open island and fill it in with obstacles, or go with an obstacle-filled island and carve out paths for the player.
Tasks Worked on This Episode:
- Create a Seed Island that Grows Out
- Fill in the Island’s Gaps
- Randomly Transform the Hex Tiles
Thank you again to Pandabitz and Holofire for your generous donations during the show! We’re doing our best to pin down why the sound is no longer playing for the donation & new follower announcement – hope we can get it fixed because we hate missing the announcements.