Procedural Placement

October 10, 2017

In this post I’ll talk a little about things to consider when using procedural placement of objects. How to produce more artistically pleasing results than simple random distribution, and incorporate this into the development of a ‘flotsam’ system to scatter detritus around the level.

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Materials and Tiling

August 21, 2017

The key to breaking up unpleasant visual repetition caused by tiling is, obviously, to introduce variations between adjacent tiles. In the last post I talked about breaking up tiles by adding decorative pieces to tie together varying groups. This time lets looks at how materials can provide another even more powerful way to break up repetition.

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Decorations and Tiling

July 31, 2017

In most cases procedural content generation for games means building with bricks, where each brick is a hand crafted asset module designed to fit together with any other module in the same set, just like Lego bricks. Level generation is then simply selecting and placing instances of these pre-made bricks according to some logic, often simply using rand().

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Building Better Rooms

July 2, 2017

In this update I replace the over simple room generation code with something much better. Not only can we generate a vastly more interesting layout but also understand the resulting level topology to create zones, place keys, locked doors and goals.

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Lights, Camera, ...

June 1, 2017

OK, so we are not quite ready to get to “Action!” yet, but now that we have a basic level lets talk a little about cameras, lighting, navigation and building stuff in Blueprint.

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Project Goals, Early Setup, Rooms.

May 10, 2017

With the decision to use Unreal firmly in place it’s time to actually get this show on the road. In this post I talk about project inspirations and goals, setting up a development environment with Unreal, configuring version control and laying down the first raw bones of a prototype game. Hello World!

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On The Choice to Use Unreal

May 7, 2017

In my last post I stated that Unreal Engine 4 was the choice of tech for our new project. In this post I go into some detail about that choice, exposing some personal biases and the rational behind picking Unreal over other available options.

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Site Update

May 5, 2017

It has been quiet around here for a while, but having just started an exciting new project I figured it was high time for a site overhaul. The new site is built using the excellent Hugo static site generator and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to build a static site for news or blogging.

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Posts

October 10, 2017
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