In this episode of Blue Tengu’s Game Development Show, we take our random hex island landscapes and give them a few rules to make them more natural – and easier on the player too – based on some of the rules we considered in this post.
The first step is to get the different terrain tiles (mountains, trees, and sun tiles) to cluster together as opposed to being randomly spread across the island. We do this by jury-rigging our original island seed generator function to work for other tile types. Then we move those clumps of mountains and trees away from the beach edges to give the player some room to land. In the end, the island look more natural and give the player much more freedom of movement.
In the future, we still have to add a few more rules to make sure the artifacts and monoliths that the player is searching for on the islands aren’t locked away by trees or mountains. There are two ways we can go about this – either use procedural path generation to guarantee a path from the outside in OR we could just make movement over trees and mountains slower than over plains. This may actually become the better solution because having anything completely stop player movement could interfere with the fun of circling enemies, etc. Which way we go is something we’ll leave for the future, but if you have any thoughts, feel free to let us know! Next week, we’ll get started making those island generation tasks background tasks.
Game Development Tasks Worked on This Episode:
- Mountains Appear in Clusters near the Middle of Islands
- Forests Appear in Clusters
- Areas of Sunlight Appear in Clusters
And thank you again to Pandabitz and Holofire for your generous donations during the show. We’re glad to hear the jingle is back safe-and-sound after downgrading Open Broadcaster Software.