Procedural Generation and Frog Shenanigans!

Recently, I've been working on a cute little 3D RPG game. I've made my own procedural terrain generator that can also use custom environment tiles (pictured here):

I built the tool to help me with semi-procedural terrain creation. It'll spit out randomly-generated perlin noise terrain (that can be curved with a sin curve to make it more "islandy"). I can use this generated terrain as a base to sculpt natural-looking levels and save them as JSON - I wrote another script that helps me place/destroy the blocks! On runtime, grass and other terrain decorations are also placed procedurally.

The tool supports creating terrain out of generic "blocky"  shapes. I added on support for custom meshes (and detection for which mesh should go where with a little lookup table of every configuration of 3x3 blocks). This also gave me a chance to have fun modeling said custom meshes - you can check out some early iterations of things I started making (final meshes are in the top left):

Initially, I tried out using pixel textures. They were fun to make but the time sink needed to line up the UV maps to the pixels was not ideal. Instead, I opted for a more simple way to texture minor objects with minimal UV mapping:

I found the result to be really cute and clean looking - this technique should save me a ton of time so I don't need to UV map and texture everything by hand.

For the terrain, I attempted hand-painted textures for the first time! I'm fairly happy with the result, and think the game may use a mix of the quick-texturing and hand-painted textures.

Putting it all together, I made a character controller that lets me interact with the environment to get the scale of things. Although the main player character is a placeholder and clearly-not-a-frog looking, I implemented a mechanic where you can grab things in the environment to fling them back to you. The "tongue" is currently a sphere for debug purposes.

Starting development on this game has been a great refresher in Unity 3D and has let me brush up on my art skills. With a sturdy base, I'm excited to feel out more development in the coming months. 

See you next devlog! -mich