Blue Fire Dawn - Press G To Generate
Waves is basically finished now so that means I get to mess around for a bit in the name of “Prototyping”. At the moment I have a vague hand-wavey idea of what I want to make after Waves but I can’t really commit to anything properly until I know if I will have enough money for what I want.
There is however one thing that I have always been very interested in and that’s procedurally generated levels. This is a thing that common wisdom over on the UDK forums suggests should either be impossible or at least so very hard that you would be better off building your own engine instead.
Naturally I decided that this is exactly what I was going to spend my weekend trying to do…
After soliciting a name from Twitter (thanks to ElectronDance for the winner) I set about trying to generate a level in UDK.
The first attempt was horrible and shall not be mentioned again.
The second attempt is below and turned out quite well. In fact it turned out so well that you can download the prototype and tootle around an infinite number of procedurally generated mazes. Seriously there is nothing else to do in it except tootle. No baddies, no pickups, nothing. It’s not a game it’s a piece of tech.
Anyway you use WASD or the arrows to move and you can press G to generate a new level.
If you want to pretend there is a game in there then there is always one really big room that has only one entrance. Try and find it in the dark.
I’m not sure if I’m going to use this yet but it was fun to be coding something that wasn’t Waves (even though I did copy all of the rolling ball stuff from it).
In other news: 1 week to go on Wednesday!
November 9, 2011 @ 4:25 am
Keep it up! The demo of Waves has had me pumped this past few months, and I can say for sure Ill be telling everyone I can to buy it! =D
November 19, 2011 @ 4:07 pm
That looks really interesting. Does the prototype support some way of displaying a map, so you can track where you have already been (if there can be loop-backs) or to visualize the extent of the level that has already been generated?
That would be really awesome 😀
November 19, 2011 @ 4:09 pm
No it was just a quick n dirty thing and making a map would have been more work than the actual dungeon generation 🙂
December 1, 2011 @ 2:38 am
I guess there’s no harm in asking, there’s no chance I could get a look at the code you used to generate this, is there?