Tag: proceduralgeneration

Procedural Cave Generation in C# & Unity

Procedural Cave Generation in C# & Unity

Ever wondered what it is like to program computer games?

Or even better, what it is like to program programs that program your computer games for you? Then welcome to the wonderful world of procedural game design, such as Spore, Borderlands, and No Man’s Sky.

Recently, I have been watching and greatly enjoying this Youtube playlist of the South-African Sebastian Lague. In a series of nine videos, Sebastian programs a procedural cave generator from scratch. The program generates a pseudo-random cave, following some sensible constraints, everytime its triggered.

The following is Sebastian’s first video in the series labeled: Learn how to create procedurally generated caverns/dungeons for your games using cellular automata and marching squares.

It looks like Sebastian has many more interesting playlists on game development, so I’ll be reporting on any more pearls I find.

More in line with my blog’s main topics, Sebastian also hosts a series on neural networks, which I will most probably watch and report on over the course of the coming weeks:

Happy viewing!

Bellwoods: A procedurally generated game in only 13 kilobytes

Bellwoods: A procedurally generated game in only 13 kilobytes

JS13K Games is a competition where developers are challenged to create an entire game using less than 13 kilobytes of memory. Creative developer Matt Deslaudiers participated and created Bellwoods: an art game for mobile and desktop that you can play in your browser.

The concept of the game is simple: fly your kite through endless fields of colour and sound, trying to discover new worlds. To remain under 13kb, all of the graphics and audio in Bellwoods are procedurally generated. The game was mostly programmed in JavaScript with minimal custom HTML/CSS. Matt’s motivation and the actual development you can read about in his original blog. The source code the game, Matt also shared on GitHub.

Mélissa Hernandez, a French UX and Interaction Designer, helped Matt design this beautiful game. Together, they even versed a haiku that not only evokes the mood of the game, but also provides some subtle gameplay instructions:

over the tall grass
following birds, chasing wind
in search of color

Play the game yourself, or have a quick look and feel with the video below.