Sunlight

One of my current hobby projects is creating a procedural music system: a computer program that composes and performs music all by itself. It's still a work-in-progress in its early stages, but some recent improvements have gotten it to produce quite interesting music already, so I figured it's about time I share some of my thoughts around how it works. Let's start with a little video that lets you hear the amount of variation it can currently do: Note that this video contains a selection of the nicer pieces, so it isn't all this good. Most of the other music it currently produces is a bit more boring, or too similar to these fragments. The program is a work-in-progress and it should improve a lot as I spend more time on it. I started programming this for a rather odd reason: I wanted to practice improvising on my cello over complex chord schemes and figured a program that automatically produces those would do the trick. As usual with this kind of thing, it got out of h...

In Swords & Soldiers 2 we are stepping up the quality of everything compared to the original. Level art is one of the areas where we are improving the game a lot. With our improved tools we can make them look a lot more detailed and varied. We also approach level art in a very different way now. Today I would like to discuss how the approaches in both games differ and why we switched to different techniques. In the original Swords & Soldiers the levels were mostly procedurally generated. The only parts that were placed by hand were the ground itself and the small props on it, like grass and flowers. The foreground and background layers were randomly filled with objects. Since this is essentially a 1D game I simply wrote an algorithm that placed mountains (or trees, or houses) at varying distances from each other. Each layer had a bunch of different textures and settings for how densely it should be filled with objects. There are many arguments in favour of procedurally placing...