Procedural Terrain Generation

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.

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.

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.

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.