Piroot Devlog – Lasers, Conveyor Belts, Mini Bosses, and Procedural Tile Randomization

I have made huge progress in the past few weeks. Previously I could speed run the demo in under 5 minutes. Now I’ve yet to get through it in under 10 minutes even when skipping as much as possible. I think for a first time player it would take 20-30 minutes. So, yeah, there’s much more to the game. I still have another large area that I want to build before MAGFest that has some water to play around in. The demo build on itch has been updated!

New features…

  • Lasers
  • Conveyor Belts
  • Mini Boss fight!
  • Completely re-tweaked physics and re-balanced everything
  • Added more to the level and polished existing areas
  • Flying enemies
  • Several more varieties of rolling enemies
  • Low health enemies have random chance of going haywire
  • Missile launcher player weapon, homes in and can be controlled manually
  • Tiles that drop when touched and rebuild after a few seconds
  • Limited player’s weapon range, forces you to get closer to enemies
  • Improved hit/miss effects
  • Procedural tile randomization
  • Enemies and the player flash white when hit
  • Lots of polish on everything

View post on imgur.com

View post on imgur.com

View post on imgur.com

The procedural tile randomization is also really cool. I wanted something to help with repeating patterns of tiles without needing to do the level design work to add variation. I also don’t want to do the art work to create a ton of different variations.  This kind of look is iconic to the Metroid series and it just really helps break up the repeating patterns.

So I set up a simple algorithm to add some randomization. It searches for these blue rock tiles that are surround by that same tile. The it randomly swaps it for 3 other tiles and applies some rotation and mirroring to further mix it up. It is super simple but I may use some more complex algorithms in the future. This kind of thing will be a big help on both the art and level design side. 

Procedural Tile Randomization

This entry was posted in Game Dev and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.