A large part of Dance of Death v0.6.136 was the addition of world generation. Although the world is little more than a large island at the moment, the results are rather satisfying, even considering that the current method of generating terrain is purely based on elevation. After experimenting with a number of techniques, I settled on this simple formula: 1) Generate Fractal Perlin Noise, 2) Multiply noise by a radial gradient, and 3) Apply terrain and water line. Here is the breakdown:

In developing an algorithm to generate nodes that are guaranteed to be within a certain distance of each other, I stumbled over this interesting distribution of particles which were initially placed randomly then moved near their nearest neighbor. I’ve dubbed this particle system “Neural Particle Deposition” on account of the organic, neuron-like shapes it produces. Take a look:

Happy 2013 everyone! Rather than risking going three months without an update, I figured I’d post some teaser screenshots of the world generation progress on my latest project:

This name generator takes a seed of similar sounding names (or any words), and generates a new set of names based on the likelihood that one letter follows another in the original set. It picks the first and last letter, generates the letters in between, best-matches the second-to-last letter, and runs post-generation triple-letter and Damerau–Levenshtein checks to ensure uniformity with the seed.

Abstractly speaking, as creators we derive inspiration from all experiences. The more deeply steeped in our craft, the more a once innocuous stimulus or perception can become the seed of a polished creation. However, the two best sources of inspiration are most likely to be other creations within your medium and other creators. Here are a few creators and creations that have inspired me to come into my own as a game developer:

These simple procedurally-generated Space Invaders-style sprites were directly inspired by Jared Tarbell’s classic Invader Fractal. The concept is straightforward: start with a grid of a set width and height (3×5 works well), and mirror on the x all tiles except for the center one. You can see it in action here and grab the source code from GitHub.

Hymn, the low-fantasy conflict-management collaboration I’ve been slowly plugging away at for a few months, has enjoyed some progress since the first early prototype/concept screenshots I shared. Although it isn’t quite as far along as I had hoped by now, the following screenshots are a testament to its development:

At my wife’s request I bring you a direct spin off of the Procedural Space Invaders, only this time rotated along a center axis to create procedural radial spirals, or “flowers”. You can see it in action here and grab the source code from GitHub.

I’ve codenamed my current project “Adventurers“, which, although somewhat telling of its theme, should give little away of its mechanics. Needless to say, adventurers will be involved, and there will be adventuring. It’s being developed in Objective-C and Cocos2d 2.0 for iOS, with iPad support from the get-go.