#roblike

I tried to extend the tunnelling algorithm to support diagonal corridors with some old code for a C++ roguelike project using PDCurses. The corridors are built just fine, but I need to review how surrounding walls are built to avoid overlaps. And last, I also managed to shortly revisit Roblike. I had to upgrade it to Unity 2017, which broke the alpha blending shader. While I was fixing that I also managed to replace a custom masking material with Unity’s new and shiny SpriteMask. Then I thought that replacing my custom tilemap logic with Unity tools could be an interesting excuse to resurrect the project in the not-too-distant future.

- Got rid of the 1-sprite-per-tile approach, and defined a single game object for the tile map view! :D At the moment I’m generating the tile map texture manually  and redrawing only the dirty tiles. It works reasonably well for the time being, but generating the texture on the CPU can be cost intensive, so as the game progresses I will still perform further optimizations (dividing the view into chunks of reasonable size is one idea, but I also want to explore moving from a SpriteRenderer to a grid-like mesh) - Added support for larger map sizes. From the original submission, which had a single room occupying a whole screen I could have followed the Zelda / Binding of Isaac approach and create individual rooms per screen, but I preferred to have a more continuous level layout.  - With larger levels comes the need for some camera work. I created a world window object that clips the scene into some specific dimensions, and I’ve also implemented some basic player tracking. Constant camera movement can feel hard to the eye, so I intend to improve that soon by means of a rectangular frame that’ll allow the player to move without scrolling the camera until she exits its boundaries. I keep this article as a reference (even if it’s aimed at 2D side scrollers, I can adapt some of the principles to Rob-like) http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Scroll_Back_The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Cameras_in_SideScrollers.php#h.fotkmsbg57ip - Last but not least, I finally managed to fix the BSP map generation, which was broken almost beyond repair. On the animated gif above you can see a tiny in-game sample using small map and room sizes (otherwise it would have become long and boring). The header picture, on the other hand, shows an example of the generated texture for a map of 64x32 tiles. It seems there is a strange corridor leading nowhere at the bottom right, which means there may be still some lingering bugs, I barely altered the corridor generation today after all. With the map view finally clicking, I can focus on creating proper gameplay.