I mentioned in my last post that when I first tried to make hand-crafted levels, I lacked the tools to make it work; hence my slide into the clutches of procedural generation. So what’s changed?
Why, I’ve started to reimplement the Warcraft III terrain editor.
The Worm Ouroboros, that forever eateth its own tail. That’s my development cycle.
I spent a year and a half, maybe even two years, building Exon as a procedurally-generated dungeon crawler. Over that time I rewrote the level generator at least six times, edging ever closer to a system that would actually make nice playable levels and not be insane to extend and tweak.
Then I decided it was time to finally attempt natural cave levels to break up the bunkers, and the whole thing fell apart again. Feeling that the near-constant rewrites of the level generator suggested a more fundamental problem with my approach, I have decided to change direction.
Pretty much everything I do in Unity, I compare to what I could do in Warcraft III. One of the most surprising (to me at least) omissions was the ability to make custom materials. That is, being able to layer, blend and animate textures to create a final look for your characters.
In this strange modern worlds, such things require one to make shaders. That means a whole heap of extra programming work, and some pretty esoteric programming at that.
Then they invented lovely graph-based shader builders.
So I had this grand plan to use 3D objects in my game’s UI. I wanted to escape all the woes of having to create icons, and recreate them every time I fiddled with a design.
Like most of my dreams of course, it was never going to work.
