Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 21

Blue Tengu - Come on Mountains
In this episode of Blue Tengu’s Game Development Show, we start saving and loading our randomly generated islands to files and attempt to find some ways to make the generation process more efficient. Our attempt at front-loading before the stage begins doesn’t work out so well, so finding ways to cut down on the frame-stoppage when generating the individual islands may be the best place to focus future efforts.

How big we can make each room, and how quickly we can jump from room to room will all be dependent on how efficient we can make this random terrain generation process, so, even if we have to make a few attempts at it, a success will pay off. We would like to make it seamless and off-screen, and we think storing the islands in files will help boost room sizes to the point where players can feel like they’re wandering over a very large world searching for the artifacts and monoliths we’ll eventually populate it with. With a flying mechanic, we don’t want to limit players to small rooms.

As for the file i/o, we may decide to move from ini files to text or binary files at a future date if it seems like the sections aspect of the ini files will prohibit us from keeping islands separate and quick to load. We might be able to fake sub sections in the ini files by making the sections a combination of two parts, for example “Room 1 – Island ABC”. If this works out, ini files at least make things easy.

By the way, if you’re interested in your own procedural terrain generation, check out this link at Grid Sage Games because they go into a few of the techniques in an easy-to-follow format.

Game Development Show Tasks Worked on This Episode:

  • Game Maps are Saved & Loaded to/from Files
  • Test Front-Loading of Island Generation
  • Test Breaking up Island Generation into Individual Steps


Thank you again to Pandabitz for your very generous donation! The espresso will be bountiful thanks to you.

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