Hempuli's blog

Ergh, my account got temporarily suspended tonight because the hoster had detected possible malware/virus content. At first they reported only one file, which I deleted, but it turned out there was much more wrong with the files, so after some struggling I decided to remove all the content altogether from the site, and then add it back after extensive virus checking.

Turns out things weren’t as bad as I initially feared; while there seem to be some files that were genuinely infected with malware/virii, most of the game files seem to not have been affected. Currently I’m checking every file with VirusTotal and adding them back once they’ve got good results.

What’s strange about the matter is that certain games which were reported as malware only get the result when I test the files uploaded on my webspace. The files on my hard-drive generally don’t get any kind of alarm. This makes me wonder how the files uploaded can have been infected. Of course, this makes my job easier: I can just replace the infected files with fresh ones. Still annoying, and I apologize to anyone who may have downloaded possibly infected content from my site. Sorry.

So, Ludum Dare 18 was last weekend. Sadly, I couldn’t make much for it. There are a couple reasons for this, though. Firstly, I spent last week in hospital due to certain reasons, so I wasn’t in the best of moods during the weekend. The theme also didn’t inspire me much (enemies as weapons). However, due to the new rules of LD, there was also a 3-day game jam going along with the compo, so I took my time and prototyped an idea I’ve had for a longer time. It came out very well, so I’ll extend it to a full game now that I’m ok.

Play the game at this link. Luckily, the game mechanic is simple enough to work with the flash export, so this’ll be my first flash game, too! You can’t ‘win’ the level as it is, i.e. there’s no message for you for winning, but you sure can still bring the orb to the pedestal. The one level I managed to finish is rather hard, so prepare to pull some hair.

It has been annoyingly hot lately, ranging from 25 to 30 degrees celcius (ok, there are warmer places but to me it feels annoyingly hot). The air has also been rather humid, leading to sweat. I therefore justify my lack of working on the second incarnation of this map generator. Er.

Anyway, cities are in, and although one of them accidentally ended up in the middle of a mountain, they usually try to locate themselves near shorelines and plains. Also, some reworking managed to bring the generation time from 9 seconds to about 2-3 seconds. It’s kinda funny: if it was merely about the colours, I could generate the world in a second. However, because I have to also determine which earth type each colour represents, the generation becomes way longer. Ok, not quite funny.

Next there shall be roads, and this time I’m actuallt working on a game engine to go with the generator. Hopefully we can someday see the rise of an adventure game. Hopefully!

Now it looks a bit better. Still hard to read, though.

Also, here’s how stuff looks when I treat the height literally:

I also made a simple Mode7 visualizer, but it didn’t work too well:

It’s so much fun just playing with this map that I’m kinda derailed from my original objective. I guess I’ll add cities today.

I pondered a bit today about the way I want the possible game to handle the generated map. My current idea would be to have grid-based scrolling, so that you always see one frame, and the game ‘scrolls’ to a new area when you touch the borders. That way I can always load (and perhaps generate) new areas as required. However, there’s one problem: the maps are quite huge, and if I made every pixel represent an area (320×240), the game would get really big very fast. That wouldn’t be much of a problem otherwise, but I fear such huge worlds might get boring very fast – I think it might be better to go with smaller and tighter worlds, and have them to be full of stuff. Also, if every pixel was an area (or perhaps ‘room’ would be a better word), I probably should divide the world into regions, and the map would essentially consist of stuff in the current region. A region could be, say, 20×16 rooms in size. That’d make the map a bit easier to read.

Anyway, I quickly created some kinds of ‘visualizers’ just for fun, mainly inspired by the visualizers of Minecraft. They look quite horrible and are hard to read, so I guess I wont be using them anywhere.

Here’s my first test on displaying a region separately from the map. As you see, the height makes it really hard to read. I’m overall not sure how I should treat height, though – if the game is isometric/top-down, should the game just create walls to places where the height difference is high enough? Or should there be some elaborate path system that’d create meaningful areas and paths?

Here’s also the whole world visualized. It’s hard to read, but I think it has some kind of charm to it.

Started working on the world generator again. I recoded it from scratch, and currently it creates basic worlds in less than a second (compare to the older, which took over 15 seconds!) The screen size is a bit smaller, though, and there are no cities, roads or races yet, but I think I’ll be able to make this one much tighter than the earlier one. This time I think I have even a game idea to go with the generator! We’ll see.

Agersant at the TIGsource IRC channel suggested some changes to the colours, and they sure look a thousand times better! The map may be a bit hard to read, though- there are lots of shades of green!

Been hugely lazy and demotivated lately. Gotta get a game going!! And also give some use to that world generator I showed off earlier, it’d be a shame not to use it!