Infinite Floating Islands

And it is finished!

After a week of regular evening game development, my entry for the experimental gameplay project’s February challenge is finished. You can download a windows executable here (Unzip and start ‘island.exe’):

Infinite Floating Islands

[Update:] Here you can find some background information and future plans for the game. [/Update]

This is rather a proof of concept than a real game, but I am quite happy with the basic concept. There is potential to make more out of it.

When algorithms fail

As you can see on the screenshot below, the first test in creating new islands on the fly caused the connector algorithm to fail hard. It’s to late today to investigate this problem any further. As my personal deadline for this one-week challenge is in 23 hrs and as I am going to sleep now, chances are rather bad to get this game finished as intended. Nevertheless, I will try to fix these issues tomorrow.

Code is getting messy

Made some progress today with implementing an animated player and movement to another island. As suggested by my wife, the player character is a monkey. The movement as shown in the screenshot is rather symbolic at the moment. My code is looking quite messy now and working as tired as I am actually doesn’t help. Probably tomorrow I will regret working on the game so tired. Next milestone is to enable on-the-fly creation of new floating islands.

The world is shaping up

Worked on visualising the gameworld today, which yesterday only existed as numbers. Also scrolling works now. The two screenshots show the starting point of a world with the first few generated islands. Making additional islands on the fly is not yet triggered but one of the next steps to come. Further steps to implement are a moving player to explore the world and some fancy description texts for the stuff one finds.

On the screenshots you can also find one of the two new npcs I made today as requested by my 2,5 years old daughter. This one is a robot and the other one (not on these screenshots) is supposed to look like a pirate.

World generator and graphical improvement

Not much to show today. I’ve been busy making the world generator building islands on request to make the world explorable. So far I’ve just checked the numbers and they look okay. Next step is to figure out how to make the computer display the actual part of the world while enable fluid scrolling. Also the connections between island have not yet been established.

Additionally I reworked the dirt blocks of the floating islands to look less boring.

Testing the island generator

Finished implementing the island generator, made some assets and built a testing module to view the results. Here are results for four different seeds composed from actual screenshots:

By the way, the island in the middle is the island generated in the last blog post.

Next step is to generate neighboured island and connect them to create a game world.