I’ve been trying to learn about automatic terrain generation and different types of tile maps.  Luckily, I stumbled on a great tutorial about generating nice random hilly terrain, as well as a few tutorials on rendering tilemaps both from overhead and isometric views.

I decided to put my new knowledge to work to make a simple heightmap generator combined with a tile viewer. Currently my tiles are just filled in squares, but I think it gives a nice feeling so far. It supports both an overhead view and an isometric perspective. The isometric view is generated by some simple transforms on the overhead one.  I’m hoping to write up the details of how to make this work later.

You can try it out here.

Controls:

• <space> generates a new random set of terrain
• <I> toggles between an overhead and isometric view

Resources

• Generating 3d hills
• Isometric map tutorials
• Iso and Hexmaps
• Isometric heightmaps (this is for down the road…)

A while back I finished a very simple test for the combat planned for my game. Unfortunately, I’ve become (mostly) convinced that it’s not really going to be the feel that I’d like.

You can test it out here.

Use the arrow keys to turn and accelerate and space to fire.  You can restart with R and quit with escape.

I feel like the fast paced combat is too fast and hard to control in any interesting way.  Here are some possible ways to improve it:

• Make lots of small weak enemies – If they can’t do too much damage, then it can be fun to zip around and watch them all explode.  This isn’t really the direction I want my combat to go though.
• Reduce rate of fire significantly – Adding more strategy to aiming would probably require a change to a WASD+mouse control scheme. This would give the player a lot more precision in where they are shooting (although it does make the control scheme more complicated).
• Add obstacles – Currently there are planets floating around which have no real purpose other than to give you a better sense of movement.  If these were asteroids that needed to be dodged, or could be used for cat and mouse style fights it would be more interesting. Unfortunately, this requires much more intelligent AI.
• Add shields and colliding missles – Allow the player to deflect shots by pressing a key or to shoot down approaching missles.  If the player only has a limited amount of energy that is used for either shooting or shielding, this could be interesting.

There were a few more ideas suggested on the forum where I initially posted this.

In the end, I’ve decided to make a fairly large change and switch from realtime combat to a turn based system. My hope is to make the game more RPG-ish where the player has a small squad of ships (the “party”) each of which may have different specializations (“classes”).  I’m going to try a combat system along the lines of Final Fantasy first (not that I have much experience with the game).  Hopefully there will be enough options available to the player at each turn that it will be sufficiently interesting.  In any case, the RPG elements of leveling up your captain and improving your ships’ loadouts should add some extra interest.