At the end of last year I began working on a Google Cardboard VR game, as mentioned in a previous post. The last couple of weeks I have finally gotten a good start on my own version of island generation. Using perlin noise, and a smoothing algorithm, I assign regions to my map along with different heights. Below is what my maps look like now.

The biggest challenge getting to this point was trying to think of a way to layer 3 different types of terrain without them ruining each other or being too spread out. The trick I used was to add each terrain individually and treat it as either a new terrain or old terrain, which allows me to keep it binary like in the cave generation post below.

The next steps get difficult. This is where I have many new things that I have to complete before the game looks polished. The three big groups of these problems are terrain, object placement and player interaction. The biggest of the three is the latter as I will eventually have to add many menu systems and the like. The earlier two stem from a similar problem of what kind of ambiance do I want the user to feel while traversing my world. Lets divide up these problems and see what subproblems need to be addressed.

Terrain:

- Keep low poly look

- Right now everything is too hilly, I need some flat spots for the player to look around in

- Decide on a size, right now I am scaling the mesh making the triangles huge, I may want to scale it down and get more precision, then just have mesh chunks instead.

- Make it such that mountains aren’t so prevalent, or at least make them in more distinct areas rather than scattered throughout. The distribution of everything seems a bit off right now.





Objects:

- What can the player pick up and find?

- Trees are a big priority to give more atmosphere

- how do we generate flora

- Do we allow the player to be able to use anything, just set things, how does this impact the flow of the game





Player Interaction:

- We need someone to play our game, need to allow for it to be an actual game, preferably a survival game of some sort

- With survival we will need shelter, food and water

- How do we create an inventory, can the player carry things?

- Where can the player travel, create collisions etc

- How can the player build, where can the build

- how should we scale everything relative to the player?

This is a good list of items that I have to consider in the next couple of months while working on this. This blog post was also a small brainstorm for me to figure out what needs to come next. I think the biggest thing is continuing to make the terrain. Right now I have been sliding numbers around trying to get it to look good, but I have not yet defined to myself what looking good means. I will work on a clear definition towards that while checking how it looks within the cardboard.

Below are when I first got the terrain dividing up evenly, and when I switched it to a mesh.