Devtober Day 2: Starting procedural tilemap generation

Short update tonight, as I had several real-life fun obligations that prevented me from spending as much time on the project today. But in the spirit of Devtober, I did get some work done.

I worked part-time on expanding my SpriteSheet support from yesterday inside of Kludgine. I haven’t pushed the code yet, I’ll hopefully reach a point where I’m happy with it tomorrow. Here’s the problems I’ve been solving:

Importing Time Fantasy sprite sheets

My coffee-sipping, Twitch-watching morning was spent typing out large enums representing all of the tiles within the sprite sheets I wanted to use. I noticed something, however. The base tile size is 16x16, but in one file, the tiles were 8x8. My TileMap code only supports a single tile size, and I couldn’t see myself changing that. However, I really needed these “border” tiles.

So, I invented a concept I’m really not sure if I’ll like or not, but it fits really nicely. Essentially, the structure SpriteSource (the source rectangle and a handle to the texture it comes from) has been expanded to offer a mechanism for multiple source and destination rectangles. This means I can stitch four 8x8 tiles into a single 16x16 tile.

I haven’t tested this code yet, but I’ve started creating the code that creates new “joined” sprites.

Dealing with multiple sprite sheets

It’s going to be necessary to have my procedural generator use multiple source sprite sheets. However, I wanted each sheet to have its own enum of tiles, which means I needed some mechanism of creating a collection of multiple sheets.

I created a simple type SpriteMap that makes it easy to create an enum representing all of the sheets you’re wanting to use, and adding those sheets to the map. SpriteMap and SpriteSheet both implement SpriteCollection, which will be how the generator gets the tiles.

Coming up with an approach for procedural generation

I don’t have an algorithm fully determined, but my general idea is:

• I will design rooms by hand, a-la games like Binding of Isaac, and my procedural generator is for making the tiling “interesting”. My goal is to set areas to “ground” or “foliage” and the generator automatically fill in walls, borders, and alternating floor designs.
• I need to come up with a strategy for identifying what type of content a tile has for the generator to use. Through the exercise of naming my sprite sheet enums, I believe the best approach is to associate the type of floor each corner has. This should be enough information for the generator to be able to create good transitions.
• The Ruined Dungeons Tileset I’m using has three variations. The borders file is one file with all three variations, and I’m tempted to split those into individual files. If I do, I can reuse the enums across all three textures, otherwise I’ll have to have some extra work to pull out the borders for just a single variation.

Tomorrow I’ll hopefully reach a point where I can show off some generated rooms, or if I’m super productive, dungeons!