Personal site
Alex Laverty
Notes on side projects, code, and whatever else I happen to be building.
Categories
Featured series
Procedural Worlds in Godot
Building a procedurally generated VR world for the Meta Quest 2, taken apart one system at a time — terrain, rivers, biomes, creatures, light and sound.
Start here
Foundations
Water & shaping the land
- 04 How Rivers Find Their Way Simulating water flowing downhill — filling in pits, merging streams into rivers, and spilling over waterfalls.
- 05 Roads a Car Could Actually Drive Connecting the houses with paths that hug the contours instead of charging straight up cliffs.
- 06 Making Water Look Wet The little shader tricks — ripples, reflections and depth — that make a flat blue plane read as an ocean.
The living world
- 07 Building a Bird from Boxes A flying bird with flapping wings, assembled from a few simple shapes and a bit of banking.
- 08 Butterflies That Wander Gentle, ground-hugging drift and the occasional rest — the small touches that make a meadow feel alive.
- 09 Schools of Fish That Think as One The famous "boids" rules: three simple instincts that add up to a shimmering, swirling school.
- 10 Cottages from Scratch Endless cosy houses from a handful of dials — walls, parametric roofs, and windows that glow at night.
Atmosphere & polish
- 11 A Field of Grass Without Melting Your GPU Drawing a hillside of thousands of grass blades in a single go, and only where the player can see.
- 12 Wind You Can See Making grass and trees sway by turning position and time into motion — all on the graphics card.
- 13 Golden Hour on Demand Day, dusk and pitch-black night — with fog, god-rays, stars and the occasional aurora.
- 14 Light in the Dark Warm lamp posts, drifting fireflies and glowing windows: how the world stays cosy after sunset.
- 15 Music That's Never the Same Twice Gentle ambient music invented on the fly — and the reason it can never quite hit a wrong note.