Thursday, September 15, 2011

In Profundis Progress 9/15

The last time I posted a picture of a game map the region styling code wasn't working properly. Have a look at a random game map now:


Looking at this, I feel excitement for the project building again.  For randomly generated platforming terrain, I think this is very good.  Keep in mind that fluids aren't even generated in the random maps at the moment, and there will be gasses in the final version too.

Here are some in-game images:

1. This is just outside the "base" area.  When done, the player's rocketship will be in this area, which serves as base camp.  Notice the character design has changed a bit: her head is more realistically proportioned, and there's now a spaceman's bubble around her head.  Also notice the faint colored backgrounds; these are colored from leftover data from terrain generation, so they tend to suggest the platforms are extending from background features.  (Well, that's how I describe it.  Maybe there's a better way to explain it, but I haven't thought of it yet.)


2. The colors of the walls will be important; they represent different types of stone.  Unfortunately they're fairly blocky at the moment.  I've thought a lot about how to remedy that without spending extra rendering time for edge effects, haven't come up with a good solution yet though.

3. A tunnel.  Currently the background being drawn for out-of-sight areas so long as the player has seen them before; this is a bug.

4. I put some liquid into this image.  Note that the blue substance here looks and flows like water but it isn't; it can be stood upon!  This is a property of this liquid, generated randomly.  I'm not sure what the gameplay consequences of this will be however; what if the player falls into an underground sea, but floating atop that is a layer of "solid" liquid?  Should "solid" liquids always be heavier than swimable types?  I'm currently thinking that, in most cases, it should.

3 comments:

  1. Wouldn't being standable be more about viscosity than density? I vote liquids be as random as possible though.

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  2. For transitions, could you do something along the lines of dithering? Have the game draw the type of rock that the tile is, then use a mask to draw some patches of the neighbouring rock.

    I'm not sure how fast that could be though.

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  3. It suddenly reminds me of Commander Keen, in a good way. :)

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