This category contains articles suitable for most readers just starting out.
See Intermediate and Advanced for more articles.
The Binding of Isaac, and its remake, Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth are one of my favourite games of all time. It’s a roguelite twin stick shooter, much like Enter the Gungeon.
The dungeons it generates are particularly iconic. I’ve seen countless tutorials online offering how to do Isaac-like generation, but I was interested in how the original did it. To my suprise, most tutorials get it wrong. In this article I go over how the generation works, including a Javascript demo.
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A simple guide to constraint solving
Since developing DeBroglie and Tessera, I’ve had a lot of requests to explain what it is, how it works. The generation can often seem quite magical, but actually the rules underlying it are quite simple.
So, what is the Wave Function Collapse algorithm (WFC)? Well, it’s an algorithm developed by Maxim Gumin based on work by Paul Merrell for generating tile based images based off simple configuration or sample images. If you’ve come here hoping to learn about quantum physics, you are going to be disappointed.
WFC is capable of a lot of stuff – just browse Maxim’s examples, or check out #wavefunctioncollapse on twitter, or see my youtube video.
WFC is explained briefly in Maxim’s README, but I felt it needed a fuller explanation from first principals. It is a slight twist on a much more broad concept – constraint programming. So much of this article is going to explain constraint programming, and we’ll get back to WFC at the end.
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In the first article I showed how the Marching Cubes algorithm works in 2d.
In this tutorial, I cover how it can be extended to 3d.
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In Minecraft, you can dig in any direction – removing a block at a time with well defined edges. But other games manage to destruct terrain smoothly, without all the blockiness of Minecraft.
The following tutorial in Marching Cubes, a technique for achieving destructible terrain, and more generally, creating a smooth boundary mesh to something solid. In this series, we’ll cover 2d in this first article, follwed by 3d in the next , and Dual Contouring in the third. This last is a more advanced technique for achieving the same effect.
Following my development of Resynth Tileset, I’ve been doing some thinking on the nature of tilesets, and the possible ways to auto tile them – that is, to paint tiles as is with a brush and letting the computer do the tile selection. Let’s review a few possible ways of doing so.
Just to be clear, I’m only interested at the moment in square, non-rotatable tiles. Rotation is another discussion, but excludes the more interesting tilesets. Adding alternative tiles is also not considered, though it is pretty easy to add in.