The current wallpaper generator uses a mix of fractal information and random noise.  The method works pretty much how I explained earlier, but with one important extra trick.

The result of each pattern render is a mixture of big, smooth (and antialiased!) shapes from fractal information and wacky complex shapes from random noise.  There’s no way to know how much of each a render will contain until it’s finished, but it turns out that patterns with an even mixture of each type of data tend to look better to me.  To help make this happen, each time a wallpaper is created, the generator creates ten random patterns and then picks the one that came out the closest to a 50/50 mix.

I’d still like to fiddle with tiling different shapes, and adjusting the target mixture to something less obvious could help, too.  I’m pretty happy with it so far, though!

As promised, here’s a narrated video of my buddy playing the stealth game.  I’ve only posted screenshots of this thing so far, so hopefully it’ll start to make some sense now!

As an aside, the building’s outer walls in this video are out of date.  In the current build, they look more like this spinny gif.

I’m gonna put this thing up on Steam’s Greenlight when it’s closer to being done, so I’ll be relying entirely on the community’s support to get it into the marketplace.  Tell your friends if you think this game looks interesting!

In the interest of giving different in-game buildings more interesting little details, I’ve started working on some code that procedurally designs wallpapers.  I don’t have in-game screenshots yet because I need some more work before it’ll fit in correctly, but I’ve got a few examples of the types of designs in can spit out.

The method is really simple:  It starts by choosing a small rectangle with a random power-of-two width and a different random power-of-two height.  This rectangle is filled with random noise and then tinted to match one of the building’s palette colors.  Then this rectangle is ping-pong repeated across a texture (so it mirrors back and forth as it goes), and then it can be applied to the wall geometry.

Anyway – pictures!

This feels like a decent start, but I’d like to add some stuff to make it produce interesting designs more often.  Tiling other shapes, like triangles, might add some nice extra variation.

I’d ultimately also like to throw in some fractal rendering that I learned about a while ago to produce some coherent solid shapes and consistent fades.  Since large parts of fractal renders end up being big blobs of nothingness, I can just replace those spots with the current pure noise.  If random sections of the fractal are rendered into the tiled shape, then you’d get some patterns with just fractal patterns, some with only noise, and some with a little of each.  It sounds like it’d work out pretty nicely to me, but we’ll have to wait and see once it’s implemented…

I finally started working on a proper lighting model for the stealth game…seems to help a lot!  Most of the light in the scene comes from the spawned lamps now, and it’s all based on the building’s color palette.  The walls also only use colors from the palette instead of the old grey with colored stripes, which is a nice start, but they’ll probably need proper wallpapering eventually.

Here’s a quick gallery to show what some levels look like in the current build – as always, click for full size.

Err’body have a nice middle of the week.

Hello everybody.  I just noticed that I haven’t put up any screenshots of normal gameplay in a really long time, so here’s a few to chew on.  I just hooked up a prettier-looking setup for the interior grey walls, so they’re generally slimmer and trimmer.  There’s also a load of other little visual changes, so be sure to click these for full size images.

First, three simple levels…

Next, let’s take a closer look at the new walls.  The placement still works like before, but now there are five possible graphics for each wall tile:

Previously, every wall tile looked like the big blocky one. second from the right.

Here’s a shot of a building with only the walls, for the sake of clarity:

And finally, here’s a picture of the current largest possible building, set to the highest possible difficulty…

I’m still hoping to have a playable version online some time soon, but I’ll most likely put up a narrated gameplay video before that happens.