Creating a World for my Indie Game (Procedural Generation) || Keeper Devlog 1

hello so recently I had an idea for a new game called keeper and basically in this game there would be a fire that you had to attend to and it's basically kind of a survival game where you go around collect materials and craft things and there's a large procedurally generated world that you can kind of explore around and this is part of what the game looks like right now you can see I've made a kind of environment and I've added in some other enemies or NPCs the character animations working and the water is now animating too and first I started with the art I decided for this game to go with a simple 16 by 16 style so basically each town the game will only be 16 by 16 pixels wide and this is the first thing I made a little dinosaur then I went ahead and made the player character I'm thinking so might go back and kind of outline him because he doesn't have a lot of contrast with the background but we'll see about that then I made a slime this will probably be an enemy and I also made a little animation for when you attack him which I think turned out pretty ok and then I started working on the tile set for the environment I think it turned out pretty well honestly this is the first time I've really made water for a game and I've tried before in the past and it never really turned out right so I'm pretty happy with how it came out I also made a ghost with a little damage taking animation too and a little sword and I also made this little golem character now I know what you're thinking Mickey that's not original art that's a popular character from one of the most well known franchises in the world but honestly I have no idea what you're talking about okay fine I won't use it in the game and next I brought all the tiles into uni and started trying to make a little scene with them as you can see that didn't really work out the first time but as you can see I fixed it and now clearly everything's fine and this is a hundred percent functional non broken game but anyway then I actually fixed it and as you can see all the colliders are working perfectly you can't walk in the walls anymore and the playercontroller script I made seems to be working fine oh he left after that I started experimenting with adding tiles to the map within a script so now instead of placing them by hand I could just get the players position and then replace whatever towel was there with whatever time I want and I also experimented with adding a lot of tiles at once then I added a little more variation to the grass by letting unity pick out of a few possible choices which grass tile to show and I added an easy way to add a lot of water to the game I decided I wanted to work on the player animation more and you can see how well that went at first and this took a surprising amount of time but eventually I got it working and I made a little animation that I'm pretty happy with and it's kind of a Paper Mario style animation at this point I finally drew the sprites for the players walking animation and I started getting some of the water to start animating as well and I made this little scene to test everything out and make sure that it's working right then after I'd spent all this time lovingly crafting this little world for my player I decided to tear it all down because I had a better idea now why should I be placing all these tiles down individually when I can make a program to do it for me on a much larger scale so I decided to generate the world using something called cellular automata which is just a fancy way of saying get a bunch of boxes in a grid and then randomly fill each one with other sand or water after that you go through a series of smoothing steps which means you look at each box individually and if it has more than four neighbors that are water you say okay so this should also be water because it's surrounded by water if it has less than four neighbors that are water you make it sand and if you keep doing that about seven or eight times then you end up with something that looks kind of like an island which is what I was going for and I implemented this using help from a Sebastian lag tutorial and this is what it looked like when I first finished it and if you're thinking that looks like complete garbage will you'd be right but that's only because I actually wasn't replacing any of the water tiles when I went through the smoothing so I went ahead and fixed that it took me about five hours to figure that out but eventually I finally did and as soon as my code was all working right this is what I ended up with and that looks much more like an island and here you can see what the smoothing process actually looks like so in the beginning it's just a random grid of in this case grass and water but then it really quickly becomes a kind of island which is a much more suitable environment for this game and I think it's pretty interesting to watch bunch of them and you'll get a different map every time I can also vary the amount of water compared to land to get different styles of maps and this basically gives you an infinite number of possible maps to choose from so then I put the player in and had them kind of explore around and everything seemed to be working fine this is called procedural generation by the way and I also added in some decorations like the trees that you see doing that was pretty simple I just made another array of decoration tiles and then each land tile has a small chance of also being spawned with a tree on top of it then I decided I wanted to add in some other characters of the game these are other NPCs or enemies I haven't decided which yet but you can see there's kind of some weird stuff happening at first I was trying to make a kind of AI where the dinosaurs were just kind of wander around for a bit and it was surprisingly hard to do this and it took me a while to figure out eventually I got it to be a little bit better but it still had some major problems I'd say but eventually I did fix it and I think it looks fine now I also made a Trello list so I can more easily organize all of my DS for the game and so at this point I went in and checked off everything that I'd done and it's kind of fun to do this because you can see what you've actually gotten done in the week and you can tell that you're actually making progress with the game and that's basically everything I did this week I think it's looking pretty nice so far there is still a few things I need to do and like I said I want to outline the player at some point so there's better contrast between him in the background I think this week I'll also try to add in an inventory system and a way to craft things maybe way to I don't know chop down trees or build a boat or something like that and I also want to add in a way to fight things soon so we'll see how much I get done in this week but yeah I think that's everything I'll make another video about the work I've done on this game in a couple days or maybe a week but anyway thanks for watching you

Channel: nextProgram

Views: 151,081

Keywords: brackeys, dani, programming, coding, unity, blender, sebastian lague, unreal, thinmatrix, codeparade, gaming, 3blue1brown, computerphile, cgp grey, coding adventure, coding challenge, make a game, two minute papers, 3d, devlog, next program, ludum dare, ld46, procedural generation, cellular automata, minecraft, digidigger

Id: Yt27yQtGpBQ

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020