I must warn you, this is a long post and it’s mostly going over how I got to this point, if that doesn’t sound like something interesting to you, you most likely wont want to read it. Do look at the images though 🙂

Generating things procedurally is addictive

The first time I saw something generate from my code, it looked terrible, I mean, really bad. It was a cube that grew other cubes out of the top of it. It made no sense, it didn’t look pretty, but it did act as a test bed for the ideas I had about generation. I discovered Lindenmayer systems (or L-System for short), once I understood the concept I rushed to add it to my cube generator. For some reason I wanted to make cube trees at the time. I wrote a really rudimentary system that worked well enough and produced okay-ish results, but it really wasn’t what I wanted. At the time I was working on my GOAP based AI system for my end of year project, so I shelved the generative project for a while to focus on that.

Since then I’ve toyed with generating things, but nothing major. I met Tom Betts (aka Nullpointer) when I moved down to Brighton, he was finishing up on Sir, You are being hunted which features quite a lot of procedural generation, after talking to him for a little bit I rediscovered a passion for procedural code.