Game-a-Week VII

This week I was tasked to create a game using the theme: An artsy game where you mine drug laws and it's all procedurally generated. My original idea was to use room based procedural generation to create a large area for the player to explore but I already knew how to achieve this goal. While looking around for tutorials I came across a site for procedural generation in unity: catlikecoding.com

About halfway through the tutorial I started to get a little confused as the coding techniques used in the tutorial were a little advanced for me but I pressed on because I wanted to try learn and hopefully adapt the game in my own way. This did not happen. I first attempted to add my own player into the scene and quickly realised the game was not made for this. The camera had a lot of clipping issues and the player movement did not feel right at all. Acknowledging this, I had to follow the tutorial completely in the hopes that I could incorporate at least 1 new mechanic and complete the brief.

I started work on the mining system and while I created a good way to generate a new drug law from a list of 10, I did not get the mechanics of this working in the game. I first tried to raycast, which did not work well and I didn't really have the time to go through and adapt the code to fit the player controller I already knew little about. So I tried to use collider triggers which seemed like an easier solution but this didn't work either because of the way the game worked. The game created box colliders on the walls with negative values which meant the triggers would not work either.

From this experience I learnt a lot about the methodology required for procedural generation but not a lot of code and I realise now I'm probably going to have to learn that from experience rather than through tutorials. I intend to apply some of the things I have learnt here to other projects but with simpler code, starting with simple room based generation.