Procedural Generation of tile-based 2d World
- by Matthias
I am writing a 2d game that uses tile-based top-down graphics to build the world (i.e. the ground plane). Manually made this works fine.
Now I want to generate the ground plane procedurally at run time. In other words: I want to place the tiles (their textures) randomised on the fly. Of course I cannot create an endless ground plane, so I need to restrict how far from the player character (on which the camera focuses on) I procedurally generate the ground floor.
My approach would be like this: I have a 2d grid that stores all tiles of the floor at their correct x/y coordinates within the game world. When the players moves the character, therefore also the camera, I constantly check whether there are empty locations in my x/y map within a max. distance from the character, i.e. cells in my virtual grid that have no tile set. In such a case I place a new tile there.
Therefore the player would always see the ground plane without gaps or empty spots.
I guess that would work, but I am not sure whether that would be the best approach.
Is there a better alternative, maybe even a best-practice for my case?
