Stranded

TIMATHON CODE JAM SUBMISSION FROM PIXEL JAM TEAM

Pls read until the end :)

As the story goes...

Ty had just woken up in a strange place... He was alone. He had to get out of this place, this underground dungeon, so he had to explore all around it and find the way out of it... or at least the way to go closer to ground level.

Help Ty find his way around the dungeon in this infinite game where every level is procedurally generated! How far can you go?

How to play

To install, look at your right and find the releases tab and click on Stranded_1.0. Then download the zip in there, unzip it wherever you like and open the exe in there.

• Use WASD to move
• Walk into doors to interact with them
• Find the way to the next level! (Look for the red tile)
• If you die, you will have to start over from the bottom!

Timathon topic: Generate

In this game, every single level you play (and even the one that appears in the start menu) and the enemy and item distribution** is made by an original generation algorithm we are very proud of: We call it the Cell Split Algo. No matter how much you play, every single level will be very different! It's written in Python and you can see it's source code in the Level-gen folder in this repo, although what the game actually uses is a compiled executable from this source code found in Unity/Assets/StreamingAssets/level-gen.exe

(Scroll down to see an explanation on how the generator works and how to get a demo outside of the game)

How does the generator work?

Please note that the source code doesn't follow the instructions in this exact order, we have optimized it for maximum performance and so the process is a bit different

• It all starts by making an empty matrix and creating a giant room object that covers it all.
• Then, a recursive function makes this room divide into two, and then makes those two rooms split into two, and so on until all of the rooms reach a certain size limit. You can also see here why we call the algorithm the Cell Split Algo. We are left with a skeleton for the level pretty much like this:

• Then goes the 'Room Selection' stage, where we decide which rooms will become halls or normal rooms.
• Now we initialize the rooms, and the initialization process for every room is different. For example, the normal rooms generate their walls and floor (note in the image below that they also generate grass) and halls have their 'find mode' turned on which helps other rooms know they are there in further steps.
• We generate doors. Each room, be it a normal room or a hall, generates doors around them by looking around them if there is a valid room to connect to and choose a good place to place a door. In this step the 'find mode' of halls is also turned off as it's no longer necessary. We end up with a map looking like this: (Yellow squares are doors and also note that the skeleton is invisible now)

• From here on we don't have illustrations because the generator does all of this at the same time
• Based on the position of the doors, we generate the hallways now. This was a hard part for us because it was literally teaching a computer to connect dots, but with some help we did it.
• Now comes a second room selection part. Each Room and hall branches off into a variation of itself. These variations include start, end, and chest rooms for the normal rooms and void halls for the halls. This will affect the way in which they generate all of their inner loot and mobs.
• Now we have to distribute the items throughout the whole level. The amount of items that will spawn in each level is defined by the mean of the level's dimensions plus a slight random bias to spawn more or less.**
• To end, we call a fill() method on every single room, and they fill themselves according to the type and items assigned to them. In this step, every room also generates the mobs** it will have inside based on the area of each room. The finished map looks pretty much like this: (Each different color represents a different type of block/item placed)

• To wrap it all up, the generator converts all of this into JSON format and passes it into the game and the game interprets it to make a playable level. The game also adds sprites for the enemies, items, doors and Ty and they all have a mind of their own. If you can make Ty arrive to the exit, the game will call this script again to generate a whole new level.

** = These features were on the beta of the game but weren't stable enough for the alpha build so for now they're on hold. Stay tuned for the next code jam!

You can replicate the last image we show here by running the level-gen.py script from command line with python3 level-gen.py 30 30 1. (Also remember to install the required packages with pip3 install -r requirements.txt)

Thanks for reading! Enjoy the game and give us a vote!

Made with love by the Pixel Jam team <3