#procedural generation

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.

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.

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.