How I Made a Procedural World FAST – Devlog

I’m making a game inspired by Zelda tears of the kingdom it takes two and Hollow Knight in this episode I’ll be explaining how I’m making my procedural world I look at my first enemy and the ability to fly through the sky with the broom let’s get into it

So for starters here’s a quick summary of how I got my procedural world looking the way it does I started generating some of this stuff called purlin noise it was looking pretty good then I just slapped the noise values onto the Train’s height map and this looked

Terrible so I go to the acid store and find this thing called map magic I originally got the free version which honestly does so much for no cost in literally five seconds I had already accomplished more than my previous attempt which took probably five hours but I wanted roads and biomes and

Vegetation so I upgraded to the full paid bundle this is no longer a free solution but it saved me likely a decade of development time I learned the entire package in about a day my notes look like a complete mess I could tidy them up but I fully understand them and

That’s all that matters but yeah map magic is pretty much carrying the entire weight with my procedural World on its back I love programming as much as the next person but I want to get onto features like combat and multiplayer and not be stuck on stuff that’s already developed and packaged

This stuff used to keep me up at night worrying about how I’d Implement features as complex as procedural roads and biomes but now I’m sleeping pretty sadly since the solution is so good so now I’m doing stuff I never realized I needed like I can just move this

Campfire regenerate the train and the textures place that little ground patch underneath and when they have a problem the developer is constantly answering people’s questions and got back to me really quick compared to my last devlog the world is looking pretty different previously I just slapped grass flowers and trees

Together and called it a day but now I refined it and feel I have a much more sophisticated environment the biggest thing I ended up doing was making forest sounds I didn’t want to make them up too dense with forestry though since I like being able to drive off-road so I have

These open field areas they’re a bit Bland for now but they’ll have landmarks and large enemies in the future I also added some detail to the world I may have went a bit overboard the Train sometimes will form a beach by lakes and at these Lakes there’s water rates

They’ll only spawn here and then there’s branches and logs these are set to match the Grand’s rotation so they’re always flat to the surface I also added mushrooms which have a chance of spawning at the base of the Big Trees I hope to add some food picking features

So these aren’t just for show I got these big rocks and then made it so vegetation won’t spawn inside those and then I quickly added chests that the environment can spawn randomly then in the forest there’s clearings which will have flowers I hope to do something with

These not too sure yet along with those there’s these weed patches that split up the environment a bit and then going through the entire map I made pots to make wandering around less aimless there’s a regular pot for walking and off track roads for the car all of this is procedural and changing

The seed will generate a whole new world except the handcrafted sections I talked about these in my last dive Vlog briefly but now I have a good example to show I made a placeholder starting area with a little campfire and a pack which leads to a little house built into a hill this

Area is permanent every procedural world has this area and I can make any number of areas like this I could make villages or enemy territories anything really along with this I made it so procedural Parts can’t come through this area and instead made my own path what’s cool is

I allowed my handmade parts to connect to the procedural’s path system honestly I didn’t even think of doing any of this until I noticed how easy it is to implement with map Magic so yeah this area will always be here and always have these two patches of

Water either side but I left the trees and grass to the procedural System since it wasn’t really necessary for me to hand paint them so this area can still look a bit different for every player except this Little Flower Patch over the house I personally made that now on this

Topic some people are beginning to ask why don’t I handcraft the entire map the reason is procedural generation rules tend to look better than what I can do by hand while also being way faster additionally I like the areas and rare objects can be randomized so no one

Can pull up one of these stuff you collect will be more unique kinda like these weird balls in astroneer I don’t think they even do anything but it’s awesome when you find one there will be three enemy types humanoid simple and procedurally animated humanoids Unity has the humanoid animation system which

Makes animating humanoids quite easy with max ammo and acid packs it’s really accessible simple shapes these require just the easiest animation or none at all I can spice these up with visual effects and particles and then procedure the animated enemies I have some robot ideas that this would make sense to do

And I’ve worked with inverse kinematics a lot in the past while I can’t do are enemies with unique rigs that require their own animations I’m hoping if I lean into stuff I can do like unique and interesting enemy mechanics then I should make up for it

So I made a new enemy for the game this robot is the basic Troop that will Patrol and guard areas its AI is pretty lacking right now I only implemented a simple detection and then it will begin shooting lasers at you I have been working on the shooting to add some

Brains to it so instead of just looking at you and firing which often misses it tracks your velocity and takes its own bullet speed into account so essentially it’s shooting out where it estimates you will be by the time its bullet reaches what you get as a result is the player

Often colliding with the bullet as their trajectories meet I also made this sick bullet with two planes it’s a pretty brilliant little thing I came up with by slapping the two planes into a cross section I get this 3D looking laser beam along with this I gave the player the

Ability to push enemies back with a new spell and when you knocked him back they’ll rag doll before standing back up I used unity’s basic Ragdoll setting it up is pretty easy you just assign all the bones and it’ll Ragdoll pretty much any humanoid character I set this all up

Pretty quick but of course there is one single book which tripled the entire length of time it took to make this feature the enemy would sometimes go in the random Direction I couldn’t make sense of it and after two days I just had to leave it but then one day I was

Taking my frustration out on the robot and that’s when I realized the Ragdoll works perfectly when it’s already ragdolling so I did some detective work and realized that the robot was pushing itself when its Ragdoll was turned on this was because the bones were knocking into each other and launching themselves

Independently this checkbox right here is not to be trusted its tooltip says it stops collisions but it doesn’t I had to make their physics layer not collide with itself which as a solution was really unsatisfyingly simple and then there was this one last problem sometimes the Ragdoll would do this for

Whatever reason character joints can pull on limbs so I had to basically lock them into their joint so they can only rotate not move at first I didn’t think I’d have gun shooting enemies but I did want robots so they’re on team but more importantly there’s loads of shooting animations

Available online so it makes things a lot easier the next devlog will be all about spells so if you have any ideas for spells put them in the comments I do value comments and any that I see that have ideas or feedback I screenshot them and add them to a collection and then

Lastly I added full flight to the broom I really needed to just move the player around the map quickly so it’s quite simple for now I follow the guide online on how to do airplane movement since that’s all I need there’s only pitch in the auto the role is faked and overlaid

On top of the yaw rotation so yeah you can fly around the world there’s loads I want to do with this though like using Mana to go faster or sitting on the Broom so you can have another player sit on the back but it’s hard to balance the

Broom without any real enemies or objectives on the map major so I’ll have to progress a bit more before I can come back to it And that’s it if you like my Dev Vlogs please consider subscribing thanks for watching