June 2020 - Code Biome

Week 5 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Perlin Noise, Tile Assets / admin / June 28, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the generation of the 2D map for the game. I spent a lot more time working on coding the edge checking system. Currently I have pretty much figured out how to make it work. I have a few special cases that I seem to be finding that I did not check for. One is featured in the image below that shows if the edge is closer to another edge it does not know to handle it properly. It only finished the edge on one side. The error is just above the character to the left. To fix this I need to add art assets for each case and check it in the code. Currently I also have most of the grass edge working. I need to finish checking some of the special cases just like in the water section.

Water Tile Special Cases — Water Edge Tile bug that will be fixed soon

After the edge system is done for the water and grass, I need to work on the other sections with edges. In the future I want to change the water tile and make it animate. I also don’t want the tile to just be blue water. Also, soon I want to add more detailed tiles to the map to make it look much more interesting.

In the map generation right now, I marked an area in dark green that would be the denser forest area. The dense forest would be made up of much denser tree placement and taller grass and shrubs. Some of these areas would be inaccessible without cutting the objects down. I also marked out terrain with a grey area for mountains and a white area for snow. In these areas I want it to look like they are a higher elevation and I believe that I will be able to make it look higher using edge sprites. Instead of replacing the edge with a one tile change, I would need to probably use at least 2 tiles to make it look like it is higher up. Also, once I add collision the player would not be able to just walk into these areas without a ladder or ramp or something.

Water and Grass Edge Done — Water and Grass Edges are working for the most part.

Future Game Engine Work:

I would like to add elevation changes to other areas as well down the road. I have been thinking a lot about what I would like to have in the game, and I think I would like to have cave entrances spawn on the map in the elevated areas. Then if you enter a cave, I could generate a below ground map that would resemble caving and dungeon exploration. I think by adding this element it would make the game much more interesting and would make the game very repayable due to all the procedural generation changing every time you play the game.

Furthermore, I started thinking that maybe most of the enemies on the surface will be forest animals. I really enjoy nature and wildlife photography so I figure a game with wild animals would be cool. To start I would like to implement some animals that would be non-aggressive and others that would attack the player. I would probably start with sprites for bears, wolves, rabbits, and foxes. I think it would be real fun if the player could tame these animals or trap them. But this work would be something that I am no where near ready to implement.

For now, I think I am going to focus heavily on the procedural generation of the world. Then I will work more on the game play aspects. It has taken me longer than I thought it would to figure out how to calculate all the edge checks, but I am starting to get the hang of it. The next step is to try using cellular automata or another method to produce more random placement of detailed tiles. Then I would like to work on the elevation changes.

Game Art Work:

Over the period of the week I worked a lot getting the proper tiles for all the edge cases. With the grass edge I was able to use less tiles because of the way I created the tile set. So, it was easier to complete than the water. I will most likely use the new method to complete the other areas, so I don’t have to make as many assets. Other than making a few edge tiles I really did not work much on art assets this week. I want to add more randomness to all areas on the map because currently the blank colors are boring. So, this week I will work on adding more detail tile sprites to each area. Once there is more randomization the map will start to look a lot more interesting.

In the future I would like to add a rivers and path system. So, I will need to create art assets for this as well. The other problem I might encounter is if a river intersects with an elevation change. In that case I would need tiles that look like a waterfall to now throw of the aesthetic. I am sure that I will encounter all kinds of problems as I work on this, but I am hoping I can figure them all out and make everything work as intended.

Week 5 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Week 4 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / June 21, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the random generation of the 2D map for the game. Initially I was working on coding an edge checking system that would take each grid square of the map and determine if it was shallow water. Then it would check each of those grid squares neighbors “left, up, right, down” to determine if it had an edge with sand or not. Once I got those edge cases working for the shallow water and sand edge, I realized I would need to figure out a corner checking system because the map currently is missing edges in some cases. I still have not worked on that problem yet. It will be the next part I work on. The image below shows the corner cases being bugged currently. The program does not know yet to check the corner case and add a different tile to complete the edge.

From there I also worked on a sand and grass edge check. I was able to get that all set up to the same point as the prior. So, I just need to figure out the corner checks and add the sprites for that. I am confident that I will be able to figure out the corner cases soon and once I have them working, I will most likely move to complete all the edge cases for the different areas on the map.

Game Art Work:

Over the period of the week I worked a lot on trying to create the tile set for the water and sand edge. Each time I thought I was finished it would not line up correctly. I was not sure if I had an issue in my code or the art. It turned out I believe to be the art. After trying so many different looks I just stuck with a very basic one for now. The initial art I worked on had to many bends in it and looked very unnatural, so I scrapped it. I know in the future I want to animate the water and have the water look more like water.

WaterEdge and Grass Edge Tiles — Tile set for the water edge and grass edge

After spending a lot of hours treading water on the art, I decided on focusing on getting the edge in the sprite to line up correctly. So, I worked only on the edges between colors. Most of the tiles are just the solid color from the map with the edge change. Once I had a pattern for the water tile, I created a simple tile set for the grass edge with the sand using the same technique. I am just using these for testing, and I will work more on the art later. I just decided I was spending to much time on the art, and I was not getting anywhere with the actual game work. So, for now I am creating basic art assets to use for testing the code. I can always modify the art later.

Thoughts:

I know this is a relatively short article for this week’s progress but not much progress was made on the game because I spent to much time on the art. I’m looking forward to getting back on track this week. I would like to have all the edge testing done by the end of the week including the corner cases. Then I will need to move into adding rivers, vegetation, and terrain height changes which I anticipate will be harder for me to figure out.

Let me know what you think of the work so far, and if you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

Week 4 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Week 3 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / June 14, 2020

Game Engine Work:

This week I continued working on the generation of the 2D map for the game. I decided for now to take out the moisture map and solely base the map generation on a Perlin noise map of different heights. I set thresholds for areas of water, sand, grass, dense forest, desert, and snow. Most likely I am going to change the desert to mountains or rocky terrain. That way this part of the generation is determining the type of area it is, but not the Biome. For now, the map is not determined by other factors such as how much rain occurs in the area. The moisture map will most likely be needed to determine more Biomes and river generation in the future.

I wanted to simplify the map as much as possible for now so I could work on the edge cases between different types of tiles. I did not want it to just look like squares of color with nothing to break up the edges. You can see what the map currently looks like in the short video above. In the video you can see several of the different terrain types. Including 2 colors of water, sand, grass, and a tile I am currently using to represent a dense forest area. It is just a grass block for now. I decided to have 2 water colors to show the deeper water areas. I may use this for adding fishing to the game in the future. Where certain fish come from only deep water.

In the future I would like the map to have different heights in all the landmass areas. So, I need to figure out a way to randomly generate elevation change in the tiles, so they don’t look out of place. I only want a couple of levels of height, so the map does not look so flat. I will also need to figure out how I am going to handle river generation. Furthermore, I will need to work on adding trees, brush, and other objects like ores to the map. I am going to be looking at Poisson disk sampling to do those parts of the map generation.

Map Generation Next Steps:

The next steps of the map generation, is to figure out how to manage the transitions between the various regions. For instance, between the water and the beach there would need to be a tile in between that has both water and sand to break up the flat look. The same would need to happen for every area that has an edge between two terrain types.

I believe that the following cases would need to be checked for a tile that has two terrain types around it. The lighter tiles would be one terrain type and the darker tiles would be another. The X marks show tiles that we would not care about during each tile check.

Edge Cases Figure — The Figure showing edge cases of tiles

The center tile in each case is the one you are testing to see whether it has neighbors that are not of the same type. The different cases above would need to have art assets for each specific case. From what I have been able to find on the subject I need to have art asset tiles that would look like the image below. So, each case above matches up with the art asset below.

Edge Cases Art Figure — Shows the different art assets that would need to be made for each edge case.

Game Art Work:

This week I worked on coloring the main character sprite. I was trying to make the character look like a ranger. I wanted the outfit to be dark green with leather accents. So, for now I made the clothes a dark green with a brown leather belt. I used a lighter green to highlight some areas. Most likely I will take the black out of the forward-facing hair because it does not fit with the rest of the directions. It just looks funny to me. The main character in the game will probably start out with nothing or just very basic weapons. Currently the character movement is working but I need to create assets for weapons, and assets for different attack animations for the character.

Main Character Sprite Sheet Color — The Colored Main Character Sprite Sheet

I also worked on some water / grass edge tiles. I think it is a good start, but I may need to change them. Once I start working on the edge cases I may decide that these tiles look to detailed for what I am going for. I also started work on the water/ sand edge tiles, but I am not done with them yet. This week I am going to try and focus on finishing the edge tiles and getting all the basic tiles done so the map can start looking like something.

Water Edge Tiles So Far — Water Edge tiles done so far

Week 3 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Week 2 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, Game Engine, Tile Assets / admin / June 7, 2020

Game Engine Work:

I believe that this week I made some good strides towards setting up the basic game engine for my game. I started to program the basic setup for rendering tiles and being able to move around the randomly generated map. Also, I worked on only rendering the tiles that are visible on the screen, for optimization purposes. The last part that I completed this week was creating a void tile. So, if there is no tile in that location or it is the edge of the world it would render a void tile (currently a black tile).

The next step in the programming is to setup entities like the player and mob class. Currently I have movement working but I have not implemented the player sprite in the game or its animation. That is most likely the next step. I also need to create more tiles for the game. Currently I just have it randomly generating a 64 tile by 64 tile map for testing. But it is not taking the randomization data from the Perlin noise algorithms that I worked out in a separate program. Another major piece of work in the coming week will be getting the Perlin noise data and using that to determine which tile to load.

Game Art Work:

For the artwork this week I am going to continue working on my main character art. This week I completed the gray scale art for the player sprite for each direction. I probably need to create an idle animation as well. Also in the future I will need to create sprites for attack animations and others. But all that work will be done down the road. This week I want to try and finish coloring the main character sprite sheet. Besides the main character art, I also worked on a basic slime mob character this week. Currently I may not use any of the art, but I need something to render for engine testing. So, for now the slime mob can be a good test for programming the enemies and enemy movement. Once I am happy with that, I can move on to creating other enemies.

Slime Enemy Sprite Sheet so far

Project Scope Thoughts:

This week most of the time that I could spend working on the game was just for getting the game engine started. I spent a lot of time working on getting the tiles to render properly and being able to move around the map without any crashing. Since I am coding the entire engine for the game this project will take much longer to complete.

I’m working on this to learn and get better at game programming and game development in general. I look forward to the day that I can look back at where this project started and how far it has come. Currently I don’t have any timeline for completion on this project as there are a lot of things that I want to implement. I think I will take a lot of inspiration from games that I enjoyed playing like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Legend of the River King just to name a few. I probably have to many ideas for what I want to do with this game and as I move forward, I will likely cut down the scope to make the project something that I can complete within a reasonable amount of time. My goal is to get a simple but working prototype done first and then add more and more systems to the game over time.

Week 2 Game Engine Progress Read More »