Cooper DevBlog

     Today I worked on the optimization of the terrain generation process. Instead of creating the entire tile map with all of the proper game objects on top of each tile in the first frame, I instead broke it down frame by frame. I used a new thing I found called an "IEnumerator ". This type of function lets me start and stop the function when ever I want to. This allowed me to break apart the function and make it so that ach of the tiles and their corresponding game objects are instantiated every frame. This reduced the overall computational powers required to generate the terrain. This might look weird when you play the game, but later on it will all be covered up by a loading screen, making it look professional and cool.     I also added somethings to the UI showing where the Auction House button would go, the cards would go, and where the draw more cards button was. This created a nice feeling of where everything was going to be in the future, and help...

    In todays devblog I will talk about todays progress. As it has only been a day my progress has changed  very little, however, that does not mean that I haven't learned anything.     First things first I worked on the camera controller. Now when zooming you can only zoom in a fixed amount and zoom out a fixed amount. Sweet, great, that's fantastic, what's next you might ask. Well that one thing right there took me 45 minutes. 45 MINUTES!! How does that happen. I will tell you this you only do programming if you really love it.     Next, the second thing I worked on was making the map now able to generate some new terrain objects. I can now generate "rocks",  "boulders" and "cacti". I also made rocks generate on the plains and the mountain tiles, whereas, the boulders only spawn on the mountain tiles. The important thing to remember is that these terrain objects are not just for decoration, but will actually provide you with resources ...

      Programming is going along relatively smoothly as I have made a substantial amount of progress in just a couple of days. I have created a system that generates realistic looking terrain formations that are based on perlin noise. I created a system that creates a bunch of hexagon tiles in a giant square (I am working on changing it from a square and into a giant hex board), and then uses perlin noise to generate a y value at the exact center of the tile. This Y value is then used to determine which type of tile it is going to be (Deep Sea, Shallow Sea, Sand/Desert/Beach, Plains, Mountains).       I then used a random number generator and a small frequency generator to place terrain objects like rocks, trees, and bushes onto the tiles that are supposed to have them on it. The picture below looks horrendous and the picture above looks pretty bad too, but all of it is place holder art used to see proof of concept. This is what it looks...

     This is the first step on hopefully a very long and enjoyable journey. For some background, me and my friends have established a little tiny game studio where we are making our first ever game which we hope to release commercially. The game is quite large in a sense due to the fact that our knowledge on game design and programming in general is only highschool level. However, we do believe that we are well equipped for this challenge.      Our game is incredibly interesting as I personally have never seen anything like it before. It is a complex duality between that of a turn based strategy game and a real time strategy game. If that hybrid of an idea wasn't enough we also decided to throw in a boat load of randomness and make it a card game. The idea is as follows.       You and x amount of other players or AI play on a randomly generated map consisting of board game tiles. These tiles are controlled by noise to create what looks l...