Last on Land: Devlog #1
Experimental Project:
This project is a fun little experiment of mine in order to try out some new things in a new engine that I have never used before. I am making this project in the Godot Game Engine. I will be using this project to try out and learn methods of procedural generation and multiplayer networking.
Game Concept:
Last on Land is a new 2-4 player game. The objective to the game is simple, you and your friends must fight to remain the last player on land. The map is a tile based grid map with varying levels in which the players will be able to destroy tiles in varying methods in order to attempt to force the other players to fall into the water, all the while attempting to navigate the slowly decaying map to stay on land.
Early Development / Testing:
Grid Map and Tiles:
I started with a simple grid map utilising 3 basic tiles to represent Dirt, Grass and Water. This grid map allows for simple but effective fast map creation, this will also form the basis for the map destruction in the future by removing tiles from the level as they are damaged by the players.
Procedural Generation:
Using the Grid Map tile system I have implemented a simple procedural map generation for the game. The final product should have several hand crafted maps for the players however I wanted to give the option of slightly less structured and more chaotic maps that could keep things interesting and I felt procedural maps was the best way to handle that. Starting out with the procedural maps also meant I wasn’t spending time making a map that may not work as well once more features are added but the maps being used for testing are also a bit more interesting and a better representation of a real map rather than the flat tier based map I had when I first added the grid map.
The map generation is done by generating an OpenSimplex noise map and then running through that to select the tiles for the map. This method was simple enough that it does the job for now but also leaves room for extra improvements later down the line. OpenSimplex noise also provides me with a lot of control over how random the map actually is, by adjusting the period of the noise you can decide how “Scattered” or “Uniform” the generated map is.