Projects

I enjoy learning about games and procedural generation...

World Tree
My latest attempt at working with procedurally generated worlds, but this time as an engine. I learnt quite a bit from noisey-world and from Game Programming Patterns, so this project actually feels quite well organised after having some design go into it! I also finally took a look at TypeScript and I regret not doing so earlier!

It's by far the most feature rich project of mine, with the engine supporting geometry, collision detection and a light-weight event system that make it simple for users to quickly generate a world and plug characters into it. It currently supports 2D graphics, in an isometric perspective, but it's been designed so a different renderer can be used instead if it implements a couple of abstract methods. One nice little feature is that a user can provide the dimension ratios (WxDxH) of their isometric sprites and the engine will automatically create a simple box geometry for it. The engine also contains a simple world generator, which will try to generate as complex appearing world as possible with the given assets: it's possible to generate a world using just a single sprite, but the worlds look much better when having at least two so that walls and floors are better defined.

I've put together some tutorials to cover the current features here.

Noisey World
Noisey World is a 2D island generator, written in Go, that uses a Perlin noise generator to create a height map and as the starting point for placing rocks and trees. Moisture is added via a simple simulation of clouds moving across the island, from a given direction. Most variables are command line options and a good part of the generator is multi-threaded. I didn't port it to be a webapp, but pre-generated examples of the islands can be found here.

Dungen
Dungen is an (abandoned) work in progress to create a 2D turn-based dungeon crawling fantasy RPG, written in Javascript. The player selects a character and then the area in which to play - with different areas that contain different types of enemy. There are multiple areas, with each area containing multiple levels which increase in difficulty. The player will build up a party of characters to defeat the dungeon, collecting loot from chests on the way. The equipment system is a bit of a mess though! The game engine is reasonably complete, but it's visuals are lacking. 'stand out' features are procedurally generated maps, with local storage to save progress between sessions. The game has a basic battle and magic system, with different playable characters; though the enemy and NPC details need to be filled out - they're pretty stupid and it's rather boring... But it can be played here!

I learnt a lot of playing with his project but ultimately couldn't be bothered to do the big re-writes that it needs. I also learnt that writing a, relatively, large program in Javascript is a bit of a pain. Typescript certainly interests me, but adding tooling to perform the transpiling does not... being unshackled from those types of tools was what got me interested in interweb programming in the first place!

Space Shooter
Space Shooter A simple shoot-up 'em that started as a project to teach children Javascript. A simple game which partitions the screen in columns and injects enenmy spaceships into them, with only one ship per column. The enemy ships travel from the top of the screen to the bottom and randomly shoot lasers. The player controls a ship located at the bottom of the screen and has to prevent the enemy ships from passing it. All of the resources are by Kenney, linked below. It can be played here.

Useful resources
Books
Bob Nystrom wrote a great book, 'Game Programming Patterns', and, of course, he has a blog which often also covers game programming. I really enjoy his writing style.

Daniel Sunday used to run a website geomalgorithms.com, but has now turned it into a book 'Practical Geometry Algorithms' - an extensive, and understandable, resource for implementing geometry algorithms.

Tutorials
Red Blob Games A truly great resource for anyone wanting to learn some algorithms and techniques useful in 2D game development. The site contains many iteractive demos and example implementations - I can't recommend it enough.

Graphics Programming As someone who hated matrices (and math!) at school, I found the tutorial around 3D rotations very approachable, and not specific to C/C++.

Tools
Inkscape An excellent (open source!) vector graphics program.

Content
Kenney Endless, high quality, game assets. Free to download, donate or buy. The stuff oftens inspires me to make something.

By day, Samuel works as a compiler engineer at Arm. By night he's a father and husband. In his free time he's generally lazy, playing games, watching Netflix and drinking beer. But sometimes he does some programming. Any fruits of that labour is held here. He likes travelling, hiking, camping as well as playing with knives and fire. All opinions here are his own.

Contact
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