“Sinistral & Dextral” Screenshots

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Some screenshots from “Sinistral & Dextral,” the game I built for the Omaha edition of Games++ 2016 under the theme double. In the game, the player navigates a large, procedurally-generated landscape that mirrors itself at various scales (land-forms, rivers, etc mirror across the entire map; trees, rocks, and smaller objects mirror locally). Various “noise patches” populate the map, as do wandering creatures that cause the player to respawn randomly on the map.

The layout of the map, as well as all the colors, are randomized at startup.

(The title of the game refers to the scientific term for “handedness,” a kind of mirrored doubling.)

Procedural Caves

Following experiments creating other procedural game levels, the development has switched to caves. Some searching found the very interesting Procedural Content Development Wiki and a fantastic post by Noel Berry about creating procedural caves with waterfalls (above).

Above (and the other images below) are from a first set of tests generating caves using Processing. The forms are created using a random walk, which ensures that all parts of the cave are reachable by the player (drawn in orange). Once the main cave features are formed, Perlin noise is used to set various heights within the cave. The levels are wrapped (going over one edge jumps the player to the opposite side) so that the level doesn’t have smooth edges and, in come cases, can be traversed infinitely.

[ the code (in an early stage) can be viewed here ]