Procedural

Stepping inside the generated world on a Meta Quest 2: head-relative walking, teleporting, a comfort vignette, and a fly mode for seeing it from above.

The single design rule the whole project was built around, and the practical decisions that followed from taking "make it beautiful" literally.

Generating gentle ambient music at runtime from a pentatonic scale — and why that choice of scale means it can't really play a wrong note.

Warm lamp posts along the roads, fireflies over the meadows, and windows that glow — the lights that make a dark world feel cosy instead of empty.

A procedural sky that runs from day through sunset to a dark, starry night, plus the fog and post-processing that give every world a consistent, art-directed look.

Making grass and plants sway by bending each blade in the vertex shader, based on its height and position plus a global wind the weather controls.

Drawing tens of thousands of grass blades is fine if you do it in one batch and only near the player — the two ideas that keep the grass cheap enough for VR.

Generating endless cottages from a handful of parameters: walls, one of four parametric roof types, a door, and windows that light up at night.

The boids algorithm: three simple rules each fish follows on its own add up to a school that moves, turns and scatters as a group.

Slow, erratic, ground-hugging flight and the occasional rest — the small ambient detail that makes a meadow feel inhabited.

A flying bird, with no model: a body, two flapping wings and a tail made from simple shapes, plus a bit of steering and banking to make the motion read.

A flat surface reads as water once you add a few things: moving waves, a colour that deepens with depth, foam at the shoreline, and brighter reflections at grazing angles.

Connecting the houses with a road network that winds around hills instead of going straight over them, using a minimum spanning tree and A* pathfinding.

Rivers are placed by simulating water running downhill: filling in pits so everything drains to the sea, then tracing flow from the high ground down.

Scattering a few seed points and assigning every spot to its nearest one — a Voronoi diagram — divides the map into biomes, with soft edges so they don't seam.

How a grid of smooth random numbers — Perlin noise — becomes terrain, and the handful of parameters that turn it into hills, plains or mountains.

An overview of a procedurally generated VR world built in Godot, and an index of the posts that explain how each part works.