Coding Adventure: Game Idea Generator

I was staring at my screen the other day waiting for inspiration to strike I wanted to make a game but my mind was frustratingly blank So I thought maybe I could get the computer to come up with some ideas for me. I began by creating a list of possible characters like celebrity Scientist rockstar professor and so on to be the heroes and villains of the game I then listed some character descriptions to add a bit of flavor as well as some genres themes and goals as I went along I began developing a simple syntax for certain things for example comma-separated entries inside square brackets represents a list of options to be picked from randomly or if I say defeat at Character that indicates that a random character should be generated in its place In total I ended up with these 15 categories and spent not a small amount of time filling each out with a bunch of entries The most important category is the templates which determine the different ways that elements can be joined together to form a sentence to complete these templates I have some code which first reads the contents of each category into a dictionary and then picks a random template and fills in the tags so for example The character tag gets replaced with a call to the generate character function Which just picks a random character and also has a chance of adding a description to it and of turning the character into a group Of characters for some variety so we say we start with this captivating Template a mood game about theme set setting where you play as character goal. Let's see what this turns into if I let it run I thought it might be fun to share this online So I have my little HTML file which gives me this in the browser to make it less hideous I added a stylesheet and started searching how to write CSS because I've actually never done this before With a little bit of trial and error I was able to get it looking how I wanted I think I'm ready to launch my web development career One thing that was annoying me though was being able to select the text on the generate button So I looked up how to disable that The answer was nice and easy. You just add this line Unless the browser is Safari. Then you have to write it like this It's a touch different on iOS and also on old versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer and Edge I think my web development career ends here The last step was finding somewhere to host this and I came across github pages, which was nice and easy I just had to create a repository called username dot github dot IO containing my files and it was up So if you're ever in need of some mostly terrible game ideas, I've got you covered After clicking through a bunch of rubbish I came across a prompt where you play as a bunch of ghosts who take up Beekeeping so that they can have an endless supply of honey to put on their pizza. I thought it was kind of funny So I decided to mess about with it and see where things went I began by trying to create a spooky ghost - using what I learned from my recent experiments with clouds. I like how the ghost fades through objects, but overall the effect is pretty underwhelming. So I thought I'd just make the ghosts completely invisible If I couldn't manage spooky ghosts, I at least wanted a creepy environment So I spent a bit of time on this crude little generator to give myself an endless supply of evil looking misshapen trees. I then needed a terrain to place the trees in and I have this little tool I made for a freelance project recently where the terrain deforms to fit a path This works by smoothly raising the height of the terrain to match the path at several points Which in code looks like this I do several passes starting with a large radius to capture the rough shape and then smaller and smaller to match the path more accurately Anyway, that long story was all to say that I used this tool to create a little terrain and then added some fences and spawned in a bunch of those trees I then started messing about trying to create some atmosphere I started with a post-processing shader which gets the depth at each pixel and Uses a function pretty much identical to what I used for the terrain tool to calculate the density of the fog I then tried blending between two colors based on the depth and overlaying that on the original image I played around with some different colors But the main issue I had was that the sky looked really bland So as a quick fix, I tried mixing the colors based on the y-axis view direction instead to get a vertical gradient I definitely need to experiment with this more at one point, but I think it looks ok for now Ghosts can of course fly through stuff, but it looks gross when you do that because the geometry just gets cut away I first tried making a transparent shader which fades the Alpha as the camera approaches an object This works great but transparency is tricky because things need to be drawn from furthest to closest to overlay them properly It's too slow to sort every pixel by depth though. So the sorting is just done based on the center of each object Which can be troublesome to avoid these headaches. I decided to try out a technique. I've read about called stippling How it works is we first create a matrix representing threshold values of a 4x4 block of pixels We then calculate the coordinate of the current pixel and use it to get the corresponding threshold from the matrix Finally if the threshold is greater than the current alpha value. We don't draw the pixel So the result of this is these possible states where in each 4 by 4 block of pixels We can have just one pixel missing all the way up to 15 of the 16 pixels missing So this is a sort of stylized way, I guess of having objects fade in and out without having to use actual transparency Here's the effect in the game world. I'm not sure how well this will actually show up in the video I think it looks a little odd but definitely a big improvement over just cutting the mesh off I first heard of this technique By the way in this interesting breakdown of the graphics of GTA 5 where it's apparently used for smoothing the transition between different level of detail models Next up I made some simple bees that buzz randomly around the level But in order to give them a purpose in life, I needed flowers So I opened up blender and began modeling. I'm currently trying to make something resembling the dramatically named bleeding-heart My vague idea was that different plants would have different effects like making bees more productive or extending their lifespan Now if the play was going to plant these flowers, I needed a way to animate them growing What I tried was unwrapping the stem in vertical strips like this so that in a shader I can use that data to tell how far along the stem the current pixel is I can then just discard any pixel below the current growth percent as for the flowers and leaves which are separate objects I just scale them up as the stem grows So in the game, here's a daffodil the bleeding-heart Foxglove and lily of the valley the flowers will slowly start attracting bees. So let me go on a little gardening spree All right so if I descend back to ground level you can see some bees buzzing about The behavior is a little wonky at the moment and their flight doesn't look terribly bee like So that's something I need to work on still In case you're wondering about the colors though Yellow means that the bee is exploring red means it's heading towards the flower and blue means it's actually interacting with it When they're planted flowers are grouped into cells like this which speeds up the code for letting a bee locate one that's nearby because the bee can just pick one at random from the cell it's currently in Once Il'd done this I started thinking about how the player would actually obtain the seeds and came to the logical conclusion that you'd have To kill giant spiders and trade their souls with the friendly skeleton gardener So I began trying to create a little walking system for the spiders Essentially how this works is each leg has an ideal resting position and once it gets too far away from that it takes a step forward with a little work I expanded the system to eight legs to make this horrifying spider the advantage of course with this kind of Animation through programming is that the creature can adapt to the terrain and not just look like it's gliding over it Now admittedly my results is quite janky looking but I still think it's kind of cool I'm not going to go over the code for this now both because it's some of the most horrendous code ever written and also because I'd like to experiment more and explore the topic of procedural animation in its own episode Anyway, I now have spiders creeping about which brings us back to So that's what I have so far of this strange little project I don't really have the motivation to keep working on it So I mean to leave it unfinished for now But I've learnt a bunch of little things along the way and it sparked ideas for future experiments So I think it was a worthwhile project despite my failure to see it through to the end I hope you've enjoyed watching and until next time Cheers

Channel: Sebastian Lague

Views: 755,078

Keywords: Unity (software), Unity3d, game development, video game, programming, coding, C#, javascript

Id: --GB9qyZJqg

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Galinhooo]

"A roguelike game that takes place in the near future, where you play as an organization of shy detectives attempting to eat more healthily."

[u/whidzee]

The spline tool that modifies the terrain was worth it. That needs to become a tool we can all use.

[u/falldeaf]

This is really impressive and inspirational, nice job! I love the movement of the spiders and the growth on the flowers.

[u/Zetal]

I can't say that I've ever had a shortage of game ideas, but cool coding challenge nevertheless.

[u/nilamo]

https://seblague.github.io/ideagenerator/