I’m giving up, I’m afraid. My game just wasn’t going anywhere. I’ll be writing a full post-mortem at some point in the near future, but it boils down to the fact that I bit off more than I could chew with the decision to try and create a city procedurally.

This is a shot of it in its final state:

Very much as it was this morning – just a car in a field full of random road segments and paving flags.

And here’s a download link in case anyone’s interested. Source included of course.

ld13_roads_by_frimkron.zip

Oh well – I’ll keep it simple next time

Here we have a procedurally-generated motorway. Its intersecting another one (drawn with the wrong tiles), which really isn’t the best design for a 6-lane highway when you think about it, but oh well.

Well I’m going to call it a day and pick things up again tomorrow. I’m way behind but I know exactly what I’ve got to get cracking on with tomorrow morning. Here’s a shot of the current version:

There are some pavement tiles now! The reason its taking so long is because I had a crazy idea to generate a tile-based city procedurally on the fly, so currently my time is taken up with getting that to work. Here’s one of the many debug image dumps I’ve made of the tile map:

Its actually just a snapshot of part of the map, which is technically infinite in size. Each pixel is a 4×4 block of tiles. As you  can see, all I’m generating procedurally so far is the fact that there’s more pavement the closer to the centre of the city you get. There aren’t any roads yet (note to self: must actually get the damn ROADS in at some point…). The red and yellow pixels in a grid which you might just be able to make out – they’re marking the areas that the map is broken up into. The idea is that the game only needs to hold the player’s current area and the 8 surrounding areas in memory at the same time, allowing me  to have an infinite map.

So, on tomorrow I’ve got my work cut out for me. Procedural roads… collisions… traffic?!… I may have to revise my plan if I’m going to get something finished on time.

By the way, the other entries are looking totally awesome. I can’t wait to play them all!

Well I think I’m loooong overdue a status update on my entry, so here I go with my first post for LD13.

Screenshot:

I’m using python and pyGame this time, with other tools of choice including the Eclipse IDE, Graphics Gale and GIMP.

I was hoping to get some kind of Grand-Theft-Auto-style engine working for my game, but I think I’ll have to pick up the pace if I’m going to get there. My game currently consists of a red car driving around in a fields full of red dots, with some questionable from-scratch-written physics. I hope to get some actual roads in there soon