Devlog - Procedural Generation

Recently I've been busy working on procedural generation for levels, which is something I didn't originally plan for but started to look more attainable as time went on. Much like the previous work I did on path finding, there are some difficulties that come with doing this kind of thing for a free-form environment and not one that's nice and grid based, which I'll talk about more below. Even though I'm still planning to hand design a lot of the levels, this will really help to add some extra choice for players, and even open up the possibility for an endless mode once the main game is finished.

Quick note on the gifs in this post: to be able to show the generation slowed down like that I hacked some stuff together (which I explain at the bottom of this post). In the actual game this generation happens in milliseconds.

Deciding on Proc-Gen

Originally I only planned on using procedural generation for the textures of the asteroids and not the levels themselves. My idea was that since the game isn't going to be infinitely long, and procedural generation is hard to actually make good and interesting, I could hand design each level instead and reap the benefits of a human touch (like placing resources specifically to trick players or give them a huge payoff). I had a huge love of procedural generation when I first started programming, and made lots of little experiments but also wasted a lot of time trying to get the results just right when I could have been putting more effort into other things. So this was partly influenced by me not wanting to get stuck with a task I wasn't sure I could actually pull off.

Now though, decent procedural generation started to seem more attainable. After working on the game all this time I felt I had a much better understanding of what worked and what didn't for levels, and how I could have that pieced together randomly. This is partly confidence from having hand-built a lot of levels, and partly from having more tools available to use for this (I say tools, but I mean clever code for interacting with the physical shapes of things).

I decided to give myself one week (which turned into one and a half after other commitments) to have a serious go at it, so what you're seeing here is the result of that. I'm quite pleased with the result, and I think it can only get better with tweaks and added features.

Step 0 - Parameterisation

The generation is actually quite heavily parameterised, with me specifying exactly how many asteroids of each size and type, how many resources of each type, what destruction to apply, and finally what other entities to place. Because of this, I'm a little reluctant to call this "procedural generation" since it's more just clever placement of things. When I think of procedural generation I think of the huge worlds of games like Dwarf Fortress. But this approach works well for me because I do want to really specify what goes into a level for the purpose of balance and some form of predictability.

Step 1 - Asteroids

The first step is the placement of asteroids, since they're the largest objects on each level and everything revolves around them. There are four different sizes of asteroids (Large, Medium, Small, and Tiny) and currently three different types (Purple, Red, and White), with parameterisation allowing to specify exactly how many of each we want. There are also asteroid presets,