Terrain Elegy (Coming Soon)

A survival-adventure game centered around procedural generation solo-developed by Dylan Bassett

Dev Synopsis

I'm currently working on a survival-adventure game about exploring transient, procedurally generated island dimensions.

The player enters a portal and is transported to a dimension. The randomness is stacked, and includes a random island generation, a "biome", and random layers that are added on top, including a theme, mood, special modifiers, and weather.

Read more about the generation below. More details coming soon.

World Generation

The world generation in the game is based upon Unreal’s procedural mesh component. Four octaves of 2D Perlin noise at different frequencies and amplitudes, depending on the “biome” of the world generation, are combined to produce a heightmap.

A radial falloff mask based on the elliptical distance from the world origin, formed by a SmoothStep curve with added edge noise, multiplies the height down to a set ocean floor elevation at the edges of the map. There's also structure generation that seamlessly flattens the terrain, allowing for consistent and natural structure placement.

The heightmap is then baked into a UProceduralMeshComponent divided into a grid of tiles, each tile generated on a background thread with collision data cooked asynchronously to avoid blocking the game thread. The terrain generation system is written in C++, with tools accessible from Blueprints.

The game layers its randomization. Each time you enter a new dimension, you get something completely new. World DNA is generated consisting of a biome type, a theme, a mood, special modifiers, and sometimes random weather, all randomly combined (within limits). Once you leave a dimension, you can never return to that specific seed, making each experience unique.

More information is coming soon.