Day 6.5 - Fluffy rocks

As you read the fantastic progress preoccupation with fluff in this devlog entry you would be forgiven for thinking this must be day 65... think again. Fractional days are simply easier: no hard deadlines! Why didn't we do this before?

Day 6 would have been a good day... if this weren't a 7drl. Free time and focus were in short supply.

I finally implemented some mapgen. Simple Perlin-noise based mapgen with random placement of extras. We had so much better planned. We were going to use a fancy Wang-tile map generator we (mostly Seilburg) ported from Java before the contest, except that we never got the port to work.

But first, I implemented a "ChunkedMap", basically reimplementing my own tilemap. Godot's tileset system is totally bonkers. Intuitiveness and ease of use were not design goals. No keyboard shortcuts? It's a bit painful from a script too. I'm glad to hear they've apparently rewritten it in the upcoming version.

Anyway when I went to actually write the mapgen I had no idea how to place groups of tiles on the map. Finally I decided I had to draw up templates using Godot's tilemap editor, giving each template its own tilemaps, and not actually really use my ChunkedMap for much.

I also implemented items laying on the map. No, they aren't generated on the map, you have to drop them. No, you can't pick them up. But you can see them.

And various bugfixes, tiny features, and polish (it is the last day!)

Perlin noise is so boring. What's more interesting are rocks! As you might know, procedural rock generation was scrapped from the 7drl roadmap a couple days back, which is why I didn't tell Seilburg that I was blowing most of a day playing with shaders again. But, he *did* insist that "looking at funny-shaped rocks" was a real feature of the game, not a joke bullet point! Many of Dalí's paintings feature forms that are based on actual rock formations he visited. Maybe you too will perceive these rocks as works of art.

The rocks are rendered to a texture by a shader. The parameters get more extreme the further you wander.

I spent untold hours tweaking the equations and parameters, starting from Sculpture II by iq. Once again it was largely a very time consuming blind search. Of course I only worked on this because I thought I'd get it working in an hour or two and then exert incredible willpower to move on to something else.

"Fluff feature" is how Seilburg might describe it. That's too kind.