A new way to generate worlds (stitched WFC)

Hey everyone! Just wanted to clarify after getting some comments, MANY have used wave function collapse, I do not claim to be the first. I do think my application here (creating chunks with different patterns, then using a third pattern to stitch them together) to allow multiple different input types is new. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong though! Sorry for the confusion :)

It was super fun to work on it! Im glad that the music works well and great work with all of the updates! Can wait for more! 😊

part of the value of waveform collapse is that you do NOT need to generate the entire final island one go. So long as you have fed it inputs that are not prone to collisions you can just pick a starting point and run until you have a large enough plot for starting out. then you can continue to run the waveform collapse in the background as long as needed

Watching indie devs discover wave function collapse for world generation is always interesting to me for some reason lol. Its becoming so popular.

Another algorithm that's essentially the mother of WFC, (or, to put it another way, WFC is a specific case of it), is graph rewriting. If you represent your world as abstract nodes within a graph, suddenly you gain immense power in generating your world, and can do anything from generate levels with complex rules, to procedural loot generation, to managing your quests and dialogue. Graph rewriting works by representing everything as either a node or a path, then creating rules for how those nodes get joined together by paths. A great example of this is the game Unexplored, which used graph rewriting to generate all of its everything, but its levels in particular are very well done, as they're complete with traps and puzzles in a way that makes intuitive sense. Graph rewriting is the mother of all procedural generation, and it's only the difficulty in using it (you have to be very creative in designing your systems) that stops every game ever from using it for everything ever. EVEEEEEEER. TL;DR: Graph Rewriting is really cool, and supercedes all other procedural algorithms in both capability and difficulty of use, but is well worth the effort if you're smart enough.

the world generation stuff is cool but that demo from Ricardo is OUTSTANDING and he nailed every bit of input you gave him

I know it'd be a lot more work, but if your concern is biome boundaries why don't you create 'transition biomes'. If you're making a rule that says only specific biomes can be next to one another, then you can create a special biome that looks like a smooth transition between the two and use that blender method you mentioned to stitch them together. So beach > water = shallows, beach > grass = dunes, grass > trees = scrub, etc, etc... Because you've limited the number of zones that will be in contact you don't need to worry about the huge number of variations that would arise otherwise and you can make the transition zones vary in width to make it more seamless.

The game is looking awesome. I love the music too...the composer nailed it.

Im in love with the music, definitely gives off that terraria/stv vibe and in my opinion fits pretty nice with the game

this game looks really good, and the new biome generation is something i've never seen before. the character design is super cute, but i think it would look better with hats that you can choose. one of the hats could be a potato hat. edit: i noticed armor was next on your list, that sounds like the perfect time to add hats and maybe a potato hat

Great progress! I wouldn't throw the unintentional idea of wood dungeons quite out yet. On a smaller scale & with a different pattern I can see human forts as small outposts perhaps? Something that pops back up even after "clearing" an area for longevity? Also love the new music! I hope the full soundtrack will be a thing added to the steam store once you're doing the full release.

That music is 🤌

You should make the hot bar moveable from the bottom to the top

in your last video you talked about multiplayer and the difficulty sharing the map. If you can make your random level gen consistent based off of a seed number than you can just share the seed. Maybe do a checksum on the generated level as a validation.

I always have great respect for artists that nail the theme and feel of what the games intent is. The pixel art and that music, so magical it brings nostalgia to me that I can't pinpoint where or why exactly. 10/10

This is really cool, great job! One thing to point out is that WFC is not deterministic in the same way that a noise generation algorithm is, so be careful if you are planning pseudo-infinite worlds (something akin to minecraft). For example, if you wanted to teleport to a location 10,000 units away a noise generation algorithm can start calculating the terrain instantly at that location, and it would be the same each time you recalculated it based on the seed. For the WFC algorithm you would need to start generating from the origin until you eventually filled in the section you are trying to teleport to, which may take an extremely long time or your computer would run out of memory. Because of this I would recommend keeping your worlds to a reasonable size, and perhaps if you want bigger maps make a break between each of these large sections so that they aren't continuous. Anyway this is my first time seeing your project and it looks great! Good luck, I'll sub to watch your progress and root for you.

honestly the best timing possible I'm super interested in procedural generation and the like, and was actually thinking of how WFC could be used to make terrain like this like a week ago amazing video, keep it up!

That was a great explanation and visualisation on how the wfc works =D! I have a good friend who absolutely loves proc gen and I learned about the wfc initially from him. It's a really cool rabbit hole to Fall down to! Seeing you figure out the System, optimization and such was fun and I'm looking forward to more =) (The music sounds great as well! Feels like it fits your project =))

Just been catching up on the Dev logs and was really surprised to find an upload minutes after I finished the other one! This is whole game and your Dev process is fantastic. Keep it up.

This was honestly one of the most interesting dev blogs that I’ve watched so far!