Picking up where I left off last time, now it is time to connect the individual map cells. In the finished game, these cells will be represented by rooms and connections between them by narrow corridors. We’ll start with this map: In order to connect the cells I’m first grouping them into clusters based on…Read more
Technology
Dungeon Map Generation (Part 1)
I’ve been working on a method for generating dungeon map layouts recently. I’m planing to use this to create the levels for a game I’m working on, and I thought it might be interesting to share the approach I’ve come up with. The source code for this article is available on my Github repository and…Read more
2D Sprite Reflections
First post in a year! So much for me writing more regularly on this blog I guess… on a more positive note, I have been making steady progress on a game. The concept has shifted quite a bit from where I started off last year, but I guess that was to be expected during the…Read more
Making Waves
This one took me longer than expected – my previous experiments with terrain rendering simply used a flat blue surface surrounding the land mass to model water, and I had wanted to implement a system to render water for a while now. I knew that there was an article describing a sample implementation in the…Read more
Sky Rendering
Moving on from techniques for generating terrain for now, I started looking at how to generate a background for my rendered scene. So far I had been using a solid background color but I wanted something more interesting. Since the scene background in a typical game will obstructed in many places, most game engines do…Read more
Generating Island Terrain
Over the past month I’ve continued looking into terrain generation for my next game. My previous attempts were using algorithms to generate a fully-formed terrain from scratch, but I wanted to see if I could come up with a way to simulate terrain generation over time. I’m envisioning that the player will be able to…Read more
Down the rabbit hole
After completing my foray into terrain rendering progress on building a 3D engine has been slower than I had anticipated. This was in part due to me traveling for a bit, but was mainly caused by finding out once more that there are many layers of complexity involved with this undertaking. Usually, when trying to…Read more
Terrain Rendering
The last few weeks have been busy: I’ve been working on a prototype for rendering a 3D landscape. One of the key aspects of the game that I’m working on is the deity-like ability of the player to manipulate the game world. The game engine will need to support real-time dynamic transformations like raising and…Read more
On Playing God
The next game I want to make is going to be a god game. The term was coined back in the 8-bit days to describe a type of simulation game that imbues the player in with god-like powers while putting him in charge of a group of artificial beings. While the specifics vary between different…Read more
(Just Like) Starting Over
Here’s the thing… I find myself coming up with a new game idea once or twice a year. Usually at that point, I drop everything else I’ve been working on and focus all my free time for the next 2 or 3 weeks on it, until I gradually lose momentum. While those initial bursts are…Read more