Scraps: The City
The Procedural City
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Scraps, for me, is a tale of the procedurally generated city that never was and the clever little mechanic that could. When we began work on the project I had my heart set on the idea of crafting a procedurally generated city (at least procedurally placed city buildings) more or less because I simply love procedurally generated content and I thought it would at least fill out the background a bit. The process, at the time, proved a bit much for me especially in lieu of the fact that we only had about a month or so to get it done. I managed to get as far as generating meshes that could be replaced with buildings before my partners on the project convinced me that the juice simply wasn't worth the squeeze. I took it in stride, of course, but I've been fascinated with procedural content generation ever since the first trailer for No Man's Sky and it was a bit of a harsh blow to my ego to know that I wouldn't, for practical reasons, be able to continue working on that aspect.
That said, my experience on the project wasn't all disappointment, there was certainly some triumph mixed in. Besides the city I also created the throwable exploding mines (which unfortunately suffered a few glitches even at the project's end) and more importantly the balls of acid. The code for the gravity gun itself came courtesy of the school that had assigned the project, however I availed myself of the liberty to inspect the code for the gravity gun and once I had an idea of how it worked, I managed to code the acid pools in such a way that when dipping the well of the gravity gun into the pool the player generated and then could lift and throw a ball of dripping green "liquid" meant to represent acid which, like the mines, could be used to destroy doors primarily. This is when I got the praise of one of my instructors for one of the most "unique" mechanics they had seen in a Scraps project for one thing. In addition, the mechanic was so beloved that one of my fellow students ended up, with my permission, adapting the acid balls to create his own molten metal balls by adding some code to create small hardened ledges where the molten balls impacted the walls. His adaptations were quite clever, and while I did help him put some of it together I was also proud of what he achieved on his own with it, but I was also proud that it was built off the back of my cool little mechanic.