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Archipelago

Published March 21, 2009
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Spent a few hours today tinkering around and came up with this:



It's a simple tilemap in the 'old skool' style, top down and cheesy. The map displayed is just a simple random scatter, no tricks. The interesting part (to me) is that everything is randomly generated, including the tile graphics. New tilesheets are generated each time the program runs. Granted, their not that good, but the idea of generated assets is always interesting, and I've never seen it applied to sprite based tile graphics before.

I had tinkered with the idea of a top-down hack and slash set in a world of pirates and buried treasure, set within the region called the Archipelago, an area of islands and treacherous waterways filled with a myriad of strange creatures and dangerous people. Don't know if it'll go anywhere, but I am charmed by the idea of a simple game with simple graphics to get my feet wet again.
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0 likes 2 comments

Comments

evolutional
Very nice, how complex is the algorithm that generated that?
March 22, 2009 01:07 PM
JTippetts
The algorithm that generated the actual level is stupid, just a random scatter of elements across the map. The algorithms to generate the tiles were a tad more complex.

The mountains are an inverted tiling cellular function (F1) with some turbulence applied, mapped to a color gradient and bump shaded. Grass and sand are simple random speckle maps, with a bit of bumping added in the transitions for the grass to make grass areas sort of stand out. Water is just a randomized speckle map of blues with some long, smooth, ridge-like bumping applied.

For a lot of it, having it procedurally generated is sort of pointless (particularly the sand and grass, since each variant is almost indistinguishable from each other variant) but always having different mountains is sort of neat. Plus, I'm lazy, and if I didn't generate them I would have had to draw them.
March 22, 2009 03:25 PM
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