Posted October 21, 2019 by Zeritum
#tree #random #generation #procgen #how it's made
Howdy partners, I'm currently writing this on my laptop at my girlfriend's house instead of at my usual setup, so if the post seems a bit brief or not as detailed as usual then that would be why!
This week's blog post is all about trees - fun, right? Not really, but I'm making a post about them anyway~
(Just skip to the end if you want to see the new trees and miss out all the "How it works")
People always say that repitition is key for getting a point across, and while they might be correct in terms of persuasive writing it doesn't really hold up when it comes to pixel art tiles and ob jects. Having obviously repeating sprites placed next to one another breaks the immersion and makes the world look, well, unnatural:
As you can see, having a single repeating sprite placed over and over allows the brain to determine patterns in what it sees, which makes everything look weirdly uniform and breaks the immersion as you realise that they are, in fact, not real. And while my sprite work isn't fascinating enough to fool you into a false sense of reality even with the new trees, it still makes them look a damn lot better!
In order to make (mostly) unique trees, we need them to be made up of several 'limbs' and have all of these be randomised when the tree first grows. I have deconstructed a tree into 4 main limbs: the stump, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves.
So to begin our tree construction, we have to randomise a stump to build the tree on top of. In this case, I have 4 potential stumps for the game to pick from: