Cave chasms

Today, I’ve worked on making the caves a bit more traversable.

Procedural generation is very hard – there’s a big conflict between “playable” and “correct”, so you end up with a lot of code to fix situations where the generation is “realistic”, but that would lead to a whole lot of issues… Case in point, the caves have chasms… so it’s possible/likely that they’ll intersect in such a way that they’ll make half the map completely untraversable. To lessen this issue, I decided to allow the chasms to have bridges here and there…

The results are not amazing, but for now they’ll probably due… I’m thinking more and more that it was a mistake going procedural on this (although the game has replayability this way), since I spend more time fine-tuning the algorithms than I would probably would have spent authoring them by hand…

I’ll probably need to do another pass on the algorithms and remake them, now that I have some idea of the pitfalls!

Now listening: “Once” by “Nightwish”

Link of the day: Beautiful timelapse: http://vimeo.com/22439234