Paper Boy Progress Report #6

Change Log

• Added procedural pathway generation
  • This allowed the addition of a bunch of new houses
• Added automatic target placement on front door pathway
• Added Coroutines to prevent lag spikes in level loading

This week I implemented the back end for procedural generation of pathways for houses in the game. The ability to simply place ’empty’ game objects to mark the front door, garage door and back two corners of the house and have it generate the paths and the grass is so useful. Now regardless of the meshes we can generate the base environment for the front of the house.

Below you can see an animation of the paths and grass that are placed in the generation.

To explain a bit, the grass is filled in on the front door side of the driveway with each path block as it is placed. Basically we place a block, then do a little logic to tell which sides of the brick need grass, and shrink it to the width of the block give it a length and place that object on the midpoint of that side of the brick. On the opposite side of the driveway we simply place grass the same length as the driveway.

This method works really well, or at least well enough, I am pleased with the results.

Demo

I implemented Coroutines, which means there is no longer a lag spike when loading into the level, however it also means you see the level being setup which is sort of funny, but shouldn’t be included — one of the next things I would like to implement is a loading screen so all the level switches are a bit more kind to the user.

With that qualifier enjoy the demo and thank you for stopping in and reading! Please feel free to leave a comment 🙂 I would like to hear your thoughts.