This is awesome, when will we get a demo.
There's SORT OF a demo already, the prototype I made for this game during Global Game Jam 2015 which you can download here:
http://ditto.itch.io/planeterSo, there's planets in the game! "What goes into creating a planet?" no one asked. Well, let me tell you!
1.First off, you throw an orb on the ground. As it bounces into space, we start checking whether it's position is distant enough from the other planets to create a new planet of minimum size. If it IS in free space, it expands the size of the new planet as long as it still fits.
2.Now we decide the color scheme of the planet. We first decide on a random color as a base. Watch the color schemes of the planets below, notice how they shift from red to purple, to blue and so on, that's the basecolor. Let's say we picked red, that means the trees and junk on the planet are going to have a color close to red. We do this through a bit of programmer magic where we say "Hey, make this tree in a color close to red, and then make the trunk color even more offset from red to create some nice contrasts!".
I also use the color for a trick that makes the colors come together a bit more nicely. I put a layer on top of everything in the game, with low opacity. This makes, at least to me, the colors look like they belong together in a nice way.
(This is an old gif and it looks terrible to me, but it gets the message across)
We know the colors now, which means we'll get on to deciding what TYPE of planet we're spawning. This will be important in the game, but right now it's purely cosmetic. The type of the planet determines what stuff we put on the planets surface. Should we put pinetrees, mushrooms or maybe a tombstone there eh? What type of planet that spawns is going to be controlled by the player, but right now it's completely random.
4.Lastly we fill the planets surface with a bunch of stuff. I've drawn loads of different trees, rocks, bushes and what not, which I've grouped into different sets for different planet types. We then create all this stuff a bit away from the planet, then pull it towards the surface, to get that cool spawning animation!
Voilà!
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