Procedural Death Jam - Day one

Hola!

I am participating in the Open Game Art PDL Jam that began today.

proceduraldeathjam.com/

I have trying to release a working tech demo of a project that features quite a bit of work I've done with vehicular/beast AI but have been so caught up in feature-creep that I've not been able to finish anything. The pressure of finishing a game in a week is just the sort of thing I need to actually get something playable done. I have the added incentive of prospective funding for my project, so showing off what I've been working on is a good thing.

The object of the contest is to finish a game that uses Procedural Death Labyrinth, aka PDL or 'Roguelike' mechanics in seven days. My AI work is based on proceduralism, so the 'procedural death' part is already setup. It's the 'procedural labyrinth' I need to design, and then publish the whole thing by Sunday. Having tried this sort of thing before, I know not to get caught up in creating new assets or reinventing the source code wheel, so I'm going to use Torque3D version 3.5 as my base. In addition, I'm going to add a few middleware add-ons, including AFX, UAISK and my own unreleased AI package, Sentience. I intend to use as many third-party art assets as are practical, and create whatever else I need in 3DS Max. One thing I will need to program from scratch is the procedural labyrinth the process of which I'll share here. One other goal of this exercise is show what can be done with Torque3D as a sketch tool to show off a new technology.

Conceptually, the game is a single-player shooter in which you must survive an Alien invasion. You will have a hefty amount of backup, but your adversary is strong and cunning. The design concept is that the aliens spawn in a procedural manner upon a procedural world. The goal for this project is to design a procedural city for our Aliens to invade. To this end, I'm going to create a series of 'tiles', each a T3D prefab, and then randomly place them in the level. Once the level is procedurally generated, then the aliens will procedurally invade it, and then the server will deploybot to aid the humans to try to take it back.

My first step, after setting up all the code and scripts was to create a set of tiles. I began by creating a simple plane in 3DS Max and exporting it out as a dts shape. For its material, I created a blank 'tarmac' texture in Genetica, and then added a temporary alignment layer to aid in setup. Next, I found a nice set of road/sidewalk meshes on TurboSquid and began laying out streets. Once I have a couple dozen of these, I'll use a Random Sequence Generator to place each piece in the level as it loads. Each tile has a common set of street pieces so they will align and appear somewhat seamless.

Day 1:

• Created a new T3D project with the 'webdeploy' option.
• Merged in AFX
• Merged in UAISK with the AFX 'interop'
• Merged in Walkabout
• Merged in Sentience
• Created 128 x 128 'tiles' in 3DS Max, each with an alignment texture
• Rigged a set of road and sidewalk meshes downloaded from TurboSquid

EDIT: here's a shot of the 'plates' and working copies of the street meshes:


Day 2 & 3