Procedural Terrain Generation

Hi,  Tameme Tamers Tech Update here!

I know it-s been a little while without talking about this game, but I need to share this while I still can, as right after the update I started working on the level design, and I wondered.

Is there anything better for a level than to be automatically generated for you?  

Nope, Nothing! Probably the best-case scenario is wasting several hours into making every level feel as enjoyable as possible. And that's not something we're looking towards here, as I'm only one developer and things already take a little time to get done.

And here comes the Procedural terrain generation to save me.

No extras just the basic platforms in which you can jump

A little bit of insight about what happened.

Lastly, I was doing the Rolling Ball game that you're probably familiar with, and one of the main problems that I found frustrating to work in the game I was doing. the "Rolling Labs".  was the fact that in my case, the levels should be created for the user to solve a puzzle. so the level design must be on point for each puzzle, and every level should be perfectly tested to fit the puzzle requirements, and if that's changed the level has to be changed as well from the ground up.

Take a look at this

Level 1

 On this level, the basics are set, you need to get the ball to the hole while avoiding obstacles that will harm you and maybe kill you 

Level 5

Level 15

Even though I made the game easily expandable, by the simple fact of creating more levels and adding them to the scene count  I encountered an exponential problem that builds up every level you go up. 

You know, as I said before these levels are each one physics puzzle for you to solve, and every puzzle has to get extra challenging for you to get the joy of progress and give the player a somewhat harder task to solve the next one, 

You're probably already seeing the problem, levels get more complex and are a way harder task to design, make, create and test! I realized that it didn't matter how many levels I wanted to add, I had to design each one, to be harder than the last, more challenging, or just utilize other physics mechanics for you to play with.  and that meant it took longer to think about a fun way to play the level, took longer to make it harder than the last one, took longer to build and design properly the level, took longer to test and correct the errors while creating it, and took even longer to improve it for better. and testing, kind of a nightmare in this particular case.

This is tuff.

That's why to not run out of ideas  You know that thing I did with the BlueBouncers?  Is the key for easy level creation, not testing and difficulty though. but releases some of the exponential difficulty and complex level design for a newly implemented mechanic. 

This is something you could already see in use in Portal 2, where the addition of the Gels lead to a way more simple level design when starting that gels stage, but with the implementation of that mechanic, it was trickier for the player to figure out what to do with this newly implemented gel systems, even a reused room with the gels could be enjoyable. and it allowed for different level designs, felt new, fresh, and released a lot of stress in the level creation due that the level complexity could be restarted to introduce the new mechanics. At least that's my point of view, and exactly what happened with the introduction of my bouncers. `

if the mechanic introduced is complex it may not be easy to create new levels, be mindful tat this is just not always the case, and its a perspective of mine

What's next you're gonna be thinking. 
well, no level design for  Tameme, or at least not as you think. procedural level generation grants me the possibility of creating random level chunks if the player is closer to the end of the actual chunk, I can use that to my advantage to create different lists that contain different chunk biomes and these lists can be loaded to the level generator randomly every x seconds, we can add rarity to it and several other things, that can be tweaked to get the best out of the level generator.  and increased difficulty may come with harder enemies and harder biomes, who knows, now the possibilities are becoming, infinite, hehe. 

Thanks for coming over and caring about Tameme,
Stay updated on the project because it's gonna get real.

Glad to see you all around,
Stay safe