landscape design

After many hours of discussion, we have decided to make a treasure finding game that challenges the player to find the treasure on a complete random generated land. The player needs to use the hint we provide to find the game.

today's Devlog will guide you through our design about this random place.

On the theme level, we want the player to have an adventure in a place that is out of the city, close to nature. From a technical perspective, we need to auto-generate such a level to provide player non-repeat gaming experience. with these two requirements in mind, we conclude to set our art style as low-poly.  This style also allows us to easily find the asset in the online store and hire people to do such art at a lower price. now let's dive into our design process.

We first find some reference game that has similar art style, includes Minecraft, Alto's odyssey and etc. by comparing many of them, we have found a game called ISLANDERS and here are some pictures we found.

then we have decided to draw some prototype on paper and also to display the method on how we plan to generate our environment.

these two sketch shows that we set our landscape as roughly 4 layers. ground layer, rock layer, mountain layer, and grass and tree layer. we also decide to generate the entire world layer by layer, and then we start some coding on the grey model.

as you can see we use big cubes as mountain and small cylinders as grass then the default tree as a tree the big surface as the ground surface. we have use raycast method to select the spawn location. although we have to generate this layer by layer there are still the problem occurs. for example, the grass is generated in the middle of the air or inside the cube. to solve this problem we gave a wait time on each model' generation and generate the next one until the current one finishes generating. after one day's debugging we applied low-poly assets to the grey box. Here is what we have now.

Now, everything looks very alive. 

Thank you for reading this Devlog, hope to see you soon.