So I am working on a 2D escape/sidescrolling game.
Essentially ship flying through tunnel. Nothing too exciting.
However I am having issues solving tunnel generation. I want to generate the tunnel(s) of various sizes of up and down.
failed - Simple approach (just pick a random distance from y=0, for ‘bottom of tunnel’ then offset minimum random distance for ceiling
— While this does work, it never generates very nice looking curves or anything ‘interesting’
failed - bezier curves/splines
–generate various curves and connect them together, and offset for distances. A bit better, can generate some nice varied terrain, however it only ever produces various curves and not enough of ‘interesting’ or ‘variance’
I was hoping to go with a noise(perlin/simplex/???) approach for 2 reasons. More variance and ideally 1 of the ‘interesting’(occasionally floating islands?) things I would like is for it to split off occasionally, so that you could have a choice of going between 2 tunnels or more?
However, I cannot have ‘dead ends’ so if it splits, it needs to reconnect at some point or it perpetually has any number of tunnels? (bound to a particular height of world of course
I vaguely saw some things talking about ‘perlin worms’ or ‘perlin tunnels’ or ‘rivers’(such as on a 2d top down terrain map) However I couldn’t find much samples or code to reference from?
Any suggestions or links would be greatly appreciated!
edit: While I am not ready to post a WiP, if you need an example of what I am talking about. here is a rough concept of whats happening right now.
http://84bit.com/runnergame-desktop_fat.jar
edit2: going to bed, but going to attempt something else tomorrow?
Generate some perlin noise for map, then use A* to generate a path between some endpoints. Then distort the path with some midpoint displacement.
Possibly generating more than 1 path? Perhaps ill generate 2 worlds, 2 paths, then flatten them together? Seems like a lot of work but that could give 2 seperate paths(sometimes will be the same) and if they are ‘slightly’ off, they would be able to generate ‘islands’ Or find some way of ‘eroding’ the map based upon the paths? is there an easy way to do this?