It was my first ever attempt at something like this… I always shied away from anything procedural in the past because I thought it would be more complicated than it is. But I decided it was time to try and overcome those fears and try to generate islands that:

1. Look natural (= not computer generated)
2. Look unqiue
3. But still similar enough that the gameplay experience is comparable

All things considered I’m reasonably happy with the result. I wish I had more time to add features (lakes, river, mountains, deserts, etc) but most of the time it creates something that looks convincing enough. What do you think? Did I achieve my goals? Here’s a couple examples that it generated.

So how is it done? Here’s a quick step by step.

1. I start off with a 16×16 grid of water.

2.. I mark half the middle 1/3rd of tiles as land.

3. Then I go around in circles for the next 1/3 of tiles, growing the circle each time and marking random tiles as land. The more land a water tile is touching, the higher the random chance of it becoming land. This causes the land to become less as I move away further from the center while still mostly staying connected (but with the occasional island here and there).

4. The tiles get subdivided into 8×8 smaller tiles each.

5. Only the middle 50% of the newly subdivided tiles are kept as land, the rest becomes water again.

6. I connect all the land centers with each other.

7. And fill in the between connections. The basic shape of the island is now complete and it is time to make it more detailed.

8. To add detail, I use a similar method as before. I just go around in circles on each individual 8×8 tile that has land on it, randomly changing some water to land. Again, the chance of a tile becoming land is proportional to the amount of other land tiles it is touching.

(At this point I’m going to stop using the hand-drawn diagram I have been so far because it’s getting too tedious and switch to actual generated images, so that’s why the island shape suddenly looks different.)

9. With the shape detail added, it’s time to start modifying the terrain types. First, every tile touching water is turned into sand.

10. I go around the entire map twice, randomly changing some grass tiles that are touching sand into sand. As always, the chance of a tile changing is proportional to how many other tiles of the same type it is touching.

11. Now for some forest! I go back to the 16×16 grid I was using earlier and count how much grass each 8×8 tile in the grid has. If it is at least 25% grass, it gets marked as a potential forest starting point.

12. From the valid tiles, I pick 40% at random. Then I randomly choose a spot on each remaining 8×8 tile as a starting spot.

13. To grow the forest, I go in circles between 2 and 8 times around each starting spot, randomly turning tiles into forest. As always, touching more forest = greater chance to become forest.

14. For the final step, I pick 15-30 random tiles on the map as rock starting spots, and go in circles 0-5 times to grow them.

And that’s it! The island is complete.

Bonus: this is what it looks like in-game at gameplay resolution with trees, berry bushes, and bugs.

I think there’s a lot of room for improvement here. What you see took me 8 hours, and if I had more time I would:

• Add a a step between 7 and 8 that curves the angular sections to look more natural.
• Add features such as lakes, rivers, etc.
• Add terrain variety: deserts, snow etc.

Anyways, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to generate some okay-looking islands I hope this helps you. I hard a hard time finding good articles on the subject and didn’t have time to do a lot of research. The article that probably helped me the most is Procedural Level Generation for Artists. It made me realize that the easiest way to exert some control over what the island would look like, while retaining a good amount of randomness, would be to fix and hand-tweak a couple variables (eg my 16×16 starting grid, filling the center 33% with land, etc). Other 100% randomized methods (for example) don’t look or play as well, but I did learn to subdivide a large grid into a smaller one from it. I also decided against fancier algorithms like perlin noise (as Notch famously uses in MineCraft) due to time constraints.

Questions? Suggestions? How would you have done it? Leave me a comment!

Go dig up some treasure, and do watch out for angry subterranean creatures.

Previously I used our own unofficial plugin for Playtomic, but with a heavy heart, I have decided to stop supporting it because the service is too unreliable and may cease to exist completely within the next month. There will be no further updates, fixes, or support for it. I recommend anyone who’s considering it should chose Clay.io instead

In the game, your castle is under siege from bad guys and you have to use your full arsenal or traps, weapons and spells to defend it. Think of it as a sort of mashup between lane-based tower defense games like Plants vs Zombies and action heavy defense games where you’re in direct control of a character like The Last Stand. We just had our first little playtest and feedback session over the weekend, so I wanted to share a video of what was tested:

Of course we still have loads left to do with a lot of improvements planned, but overall I’m happy with the direction the game is moving in and it’s really starting to come together now. Next up we’re adding a shotgun, iceball, lightning, and heal spells to round out the player’s arsenal, along with a levelling system with talent trees to unlock and upgrade abilities.

Just for fun and because I like seeing how games change over time during development, here’s a series of screenshots that show how the game has evolved…

16/07/2012

06/07/2012

25/06/2012

12/06/2012

06/06/2012

Feedback? Questions? Idea for a name for the game? Leave a comment!

• The Old Man is everybody’s favourite customer. He doesn’t mind a wait, and is happy even with slight – or more than slight – imperfections.
• Little Girls love cake, and this one is no exception. She isn’t picky, but has the patience of a 5 year-old.
• Geek read about your bakery on the internet. Now he’s here to download a cake in real life.
• Don’t ever call Hipster a hipster, but be sure to bake her delicious cake made of all-digital organic pixels.
• Business Man is busy doing business and he’s late for his meeting! Serve his cake quickly before he takes off.
• Princess is used to getting exactly what she wants. Hurry or she’ll get upset, and that cake better be perfect!

You may be the Cake Star, but remember, the customer is king. (Or queen!)
 

Cake Star is a cooking time management game. You will take cake orders from customers, then bake cakes, frost them and decorate them.

A few curious passers by trickle in as you start out. The cakes start simple – bake them to perfection and frost them to match.

It won’t be long before the word gets out on your delicious concoctions! Customers will ask for toppings on their cakes, and you won’t mind. After all, decorating is the best part of making cakes. You might even want to freshen up the place with some new wallpaper and tasteful accents.

Now your little cake shop is really hoppin’, with more tables and ovens and a cake pop station too. Mmmm cake pops…
Better feed Ms. Princess over there with the scowl on her face, she looks ready to bite!

Hope you enjoyed this first look at Cake Star. We can’t wait for you all to play.

When I was still a game design student in Vancouver, I was taught this life-changing design tool by Wil Mozell - I don’t mean to name drop, I just owe a lot to this guy – over lunch at a White Spot. At least one mind was blown in that generic family-style restaurant that day. I’ve been whipping this tool out to evaluate every bit of game design I do ever since. Trust  me, it’s amazing.
The tool is a deceptively simple diagram that I call the ‘Core Diagram’:

In this model, the core mechanic is at the very center and forms a nucleus for your game. The other mechanics form layers around the core, with the narrative forming the very outer layer.

Theory-crafting game designers love to define words, as do I, so let’s not skip that bit! By mechanic I mean a system that facilitates interaction, and by interaction I mean a kind of conversation between the player and the game. Neither of these words actually amount to what games actually are, because a game is the experience generated by those words when they get put in a disco with the player’s brain and circumstance. However, until we invent neuro-technology that can transfer experiences directly from one brain to another, what us game designers can control within this dance are the mechanics. The mechanics are the paint and paintbrush, the nail and hammer, the two girls and cup of our art!

But still, it’s probably not very clear what exactly is a ‘Core’ mechanic in a game.  Easiest way to understand it, I think, is in relation to time.

• The core mechanic in a game will usually be the purposeful interaction that occurs the most frequently. In a platforming game, this is usually jumping. In a shooter, it is usually shooting. In a racing game, it will be driving. Another way to determine the core mechanic is, if without it, you wouldn’t be able to play the game at all.
• The secondary mechanics are the interactions that happen less frequently. They could even be layered out from more frequent to least frequent.
• Progression systems form the mechanical envelope of the game, being the source of change within the game system at a holistic level.
• The Narrative layer is the outer most layer that puts all the inner layers within it into context.

Gameplay Innovation

Now that you understand the model, could you guess which games each of these core diagrams represent?

The answers are:
A. Super Mario Bros.
B. Portal
C. Flower
D. Every fantasy RPG ever made

There are some qualitative observations that can be made immediately, just from looking at these examples.

• The best games usually have a very strong core mechanic that is easy to grasp but provides room to expand upon. It also helps if the mechanic has a powerful meaning to it of its own – there’s a good reason why shooting is such a popular core mechanic in our field.

• The most effective games are ones where each layer compliments the other. You can test the relationship between the layers by seeing what effect each layer has on the other. i.e. “In order to remove enemies, I must jump, and in order to progress through levels, I must remove enemies.” If your layers don’t have this kind of gating relationship going outward, and contextual relationship going inward, you may want to re-consider your design!

• Truly fresh experiences often result from innovations at the core of the game. For example, Flower is to this day one of my most memorable game experiences because I’d never played a game that made me feel so much like I was flying in the wind. It had an unusual core mechanic, and it did that mechanic extremely well.

• Sometimes innovation comes from having an unusual combination of layers, for example, the shooting core mechanic won’t normally be paired with solving puzzles. But Portal did it, and did it well.
  Also consider how Portal differs from shooter games that have puzzles on the side (puzzles that do not use the shooting mechanic in order to solve them), and how effective those experiences are in comparison.

• Some combinations of mechanics are truly timeless, such as D. It’s like a classic dish in French cuisine – it tastes good, and it’s hard to mess with.

Mobile and Social

In the last year or so I started looking at social and mobile games in this light, and again, it’s really fascinating to see how they map.

Let’s play guess the game again! Ready?
A. Angry Birds
B. CityVille
Now some more observations!

• The biggest shift in design caused by new platforms and audiences are in the Core and the Narrative layers. Removing pigs is no different from removing mushrooms, and completion or unlocking mechanics have always been staples in progression design. This is really interesting to me because I understand it to mean that the Core shifts mostly with new interfaces or platforms, like the touch screen, while Narratives shift because of the different players that the games target. But otherwise, game design is still game design!

• Angry Birds is an awkwardly designed game. Flinging relates to removing pigs, but the relationship is indirect, and sometimes feels arbitrary, even. This also makes relating flinging to completing levels rather awkward. You know that strange feeling you get in an Angry Birds level where you have that one pig off to the side that you can’t seem to get, and you’re madly playing fling trial-and-error to get it? Yea, it gets a little awkward, and not fun! Something else that gets left out in this diagram is the points system, it just doesn’t fit very well with the other layers. Removing pigs gets you points but you have to remove them anyway so it’s redundant, and the points are needed to complete the levels but in an entirely arbitrary way!  Every game designer in the world has their own opinion on how Angry Birds got to be so big, but I think I have proof here that it ain’t the design ;D

• In comparison, CityVille is amazingly elegant within the inner 3 layers. Look how tightly collecting currency weaves into buying buildings, and collecting XP weaves into unlocking buildings, which weaves back into buying buildings, and then again, weaves back into collecting from them. Beautiful! But, there is still a weakness, and it’s a big one. Exactly how does clicking buildings to collect from them (it’s not even made very clear that they are supposed to be taxes) and unlocking buildings (again, messaged in a very ‘game-y’ way with buildings unlocking at every level) make you a better mayor? CityVille could do well with some tweaks in how it integrates its overall narrative.

• I don’t have a diagram here for all the Zynga games but my biggest beef with them is that almost every one of their virtual world games (other than their newer Indiana Jones game and the hidden object game) have the same 3 inner layers – collect/harvest, buy stuff, unlock stuff. It’s like they know how good it is and they wanted to explore that same design until noone wanted to play it anymore.

I haven’t tackled how social/multiplayer fits into all this, that would be a post of its own. But a good measure to go by is, a truly social game would require more than one player involved at each of the layers. If I were to make a Zynga game more social, for example, I would make collecting an activity done with friends (this is already the case), buying buildings would be in relation to friends (for example, if I buy the Fashion Design Studio building and you buy the Clothing Boutique building, I could supply you with clothes for your building and we could split profits, right?) etc. Is it any wonder MMO games like WoW are so powerful? They take the classic RPG formula and apply social dynamics every step of the way.

Strategy Games a.k.a. The Slow Core

The core mechanics I’ve looked at in other games so far have a physical ‘fun’ to it on its own. A good designer working on a platformer would pay a lot of attention to the physics of a single jump so that the core activity feels good even without the secondary mechanics or progression. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that every core mechanic needs to have such a twitchy tight singular loop. Looking at strategic games, for example, the core mechanic is often ‘unit placement’. Physically speaking, there’s nothing innately joyful about placing a unit in a strategy game, but look at it as a cerebral activity and it sheds light on how deep and meaningful this core mechanic can be and why strategy games are so much fun. Note also that with strategy games, the core mechanic is far more complex and involves lots of different feedback loops within it. In other words, there’s a lot more information being processed within the interaction right in the core!

Multiple Cores and Modal Shifts

I would also add a caveat here and say that not all games fit this mould so well, and those are some of the most fun. Many successful games do modal shifts where you go from one core diagram to another. This works really well, I think, if one set of mechanics is more twitch and the other more relaxed, and the modal shift is used for pacing. A great example of this is one of my favourite game franchises of all time, Mass Effect!

I hope this tool is as inspiring for you as it has been for me, at the very least I hope you find the musings interesting. Try mapping some of your favourite games and see what the diagram can teach you through them. Are there any games that really don’t map at all? Let me know!

Keep an eye on us for Cake Star news.

As usual I used my favourite tools FlashDevelop + Flixel to make it happen, along with AIRKinect and the Kinect SDK for the Kinect side of things.

Check out the final result here!