I dove head-first into procedural generation (and ds grids) since it's the thing I most wanted to learn about during the jam. HeartBeast has an
awesome tutorial series on YouTube for exactly this, so it was easier to grasp than I thought it would be.
The result of going through the first tutorial vid.
What I want for my levels is for the path to begin in the West, allow it to meander North/South but inevitably head East. So it was a matter of setting the starting coordinate and restricting the directional movement of the controller.
These paths don't double back on themselves and they have a tendency to head Eastward.
It doesn't seem like much, but I'm very excited about this. Just needed to make a couple more tweaks. Made sure the path wouldn't make those consecutive zig-zag turns, broke the repeat function if the path approached the room width, and ensured that the end of the path would be East-facing.
This is where I am now.
What I'm looking at next is:
- Autotiling; placing road tiles, grass tiles, and partial road/grass tiles appropriately
- Populating the map with spawn points for enemies, resources, and random events
- Making sure the payload can automatically track/follow the path that's been laid down. This is a somewhat important one, and just the thought of trying to figure it out is making me sweat :')