next »

[besttof]

For now, just a teaser image that kind of evolved when I was trying to come up with a logo. Don't get too attached to the color scheme, I'll drop it eventually. I think.

I hope I will be able to finish this, march 24 is awfully close 

[besttof]

 

I was afraid it would happen, and it did: I will not be able to finish this before march 24th ( but given the amount of replies on my initial post, I don't think anyone would lose any sleep over it ).

Despite the over-obvious case of underestimating my available time and the work that needed to be done, i did managed to create a pretty cool landscape generator: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koekjesbaby/sets/72157604169763039/ ( amongst other things  )

I'm still pretty confident that my idea ( and thus the final game ) will at least entertain one or two people, which is enough to motivate me to finish the game after the competition has finished. All in good time.

[Robert]

Nice generator, reminds me of the Worms series. Can you give a brief rundown on how you make the landscapes?

Shame you won't be finished in time, hope it does eventually see the light of day!

[Corpus]

Yeah, it looks like it could be cool (but obviously it's impossible to really tell at this stage). I hope you finish it.

[Massena]

I really like the way this looks, it would be great if you finished this. 
Can you explain how you generate the landscapes?

[ChevyRay]

Awesome title screen. I think the game should be in that style as well.

[John Nesky]

I, too, am very eager to hear about this landscape tool. I've dabbled with making 2D landscape builders in the past, but have had less luck than you seem to have had.

[besttof]

Whoohey, reactions.

The landscape generation is actually pretty straightforward. It starts out as a simple two dimensional boolean array ( or a one bit image ), which is filled with a couple of random shapes. After that I smooth and clean up the array/image a bit to prevent errors later on.

I then trace the outlines of the white pixels and relax the outlines a couple of iterations. Finally, I place a trim where the normal of an outline has a positive y component ( there's also a chance that a cactus gets placed at those points ).

For the VGNG competition this would have been it, but now that I've "bought" myself some more time I'm tempted to spend some more time on it and make the level generation more flexible and less random.