PÄLS & FJÄDER

Päls & Fjäder: Skogshjältarna was the first game project we developed during our studies at Futuregames. I was assigned the role of Lead Programmer as well as being in charge of the procedural generation of the world.

Project Length

3 weeks

Team Size

My Roles

Lead Programmer

Procedural Generation

WHAT I LEARNED

I was in charge of procedural generation of the game, something I have always been interested in doing but never really had the opportunity to work on. I chose to use perlin noise to generate slight variations in the level each time it is played. I chose to go for hexagons as it would allow for prefabs to be tiled, but the world to also look more smooth than a standard cubic grid. I followed a tutorial by Game Dev Guide on Youtube to learn the basics of hex grid generation. I clamped the height offsets so that each layer would be on the same height, making the terrain look smoother and more stylized.

CHALLENGES

We decided on a game theme and overall concept pretty much on the first day. After that, we progressed very quickly and were able to complete the game relatively fast, with much time to spare. I would say one of the challenges was scoping, I believe we somewhat underscoped the game in the sense that we could have done even more. It's a complete game in itself and the kids who playtested it seemed to love it, but I still feel like we could probably have added more things. We instead got to polish a lot, which was also a good thing.

CODE

The world generation took place in these stages:

Landmass generation - where the ground tiles are generated and their heights are offset.
Merging of the heights into single entities, for performance reasons. This was originally made when we had a pixelated world to merge only specific layers together to make the outlines generate, I would now rather merge the entire terrain together as we stopped using pixelization.
Detail decoration, starting with the firewatch tower that always generates at the same location, in the center of the map. Then I fill the rest of the tiles with trees and decor, as well as mountain ranges surrounding the map.