Recommendations:
"Only Tiles" is much more fun to play than "Tiles & Terrain" (which is more likely to give impossible levels)
No water is more fun than water
I think 60x60 is a better default size; larger levels allows for more exploration and slightly more freedom
You may find it more fun to experiment with tile strings yourself, but here's a copy+paste of some of the tile strings we had saved in our code.
I have a confession to make. You remember when me and soccer did that one collab with the ridiculous name that looked really crazy? At least a few of you played it. Well, as you might have guessed by the title of this topic, that cave was actually randomly generated!
I'm sure you have many questions (well maybe not IDK), so I'll go ahead and answer some for you
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If it was randomly generated, how is it a collab?
Both the idea of randomly generating caves and the actual code to do so was a collaborative effort. But for the record Soccer was the one to push the button that created the level
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So why try randomly generating caves?
Curiosity, I guess. I think Soccer was getting his feet wet coding in C++, and the idea came up in a conversation about making code generated cave templates
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Why release a randomly generated cave as a collab?
Cuz we immediately discovered that playing these random caves was like the most fun we'd ever had playing HatPC. To quote myself back then, "it's like the madness of chaos theory but expanded to every type of tile". We wanted to share this with others, but first we wanted to see how well a random cave could pass for a legitimate one (apparently mixed reactions). I'd go as far to say I wanted people to try it more than actual levels that I've invested time making.
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Well that was like 7 months ago, why'd you take so long to actually share this with others
A few reasons compounded by laziness.
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We originally did this on a code interview website that allowed us to code collaboratively. Our code was a mess, and besides that it would have been a bad idea to just link to the page we had the code on. We asked Livio if he could added the random cave generator to the site, and he said "sure, just convert it to PHP". Neither of us knew PHP so we blew that off until I decided to do that out of the blue one day. Then we had to actually get Livio to add it to the website, and then even after he did, I wanted it made a little better, which he kinda gave me the power to do but then there were complications and after they got cleared up I wasn't as directly interested anymore and pretty much forgot about it until tonight
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Why the crazy name?
Like I said, we really wanted people to try it out. I threw out the name as a joke and we went with it:
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quirvy We need a clickbait level title
YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT SOCCER BOY AND QUIRVY DID IN THEIR LATEST COLLAB
soccerboy13542 perfect
quirvy that'll get all the clicks
soccerboy13542 let's do it
do you wanna release it?
quirvy I was just joking about that clickbait title but now I'm actually considering it
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This isn't a question but fun fact: Our collab doesn't contain any right facing arrows. Probably because the very early version we were using didn't properly take the uploader glitch into account
true story
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I totally didn't even glance at that other cave you released, but was that randomly generated, too?
Kinda. I took a randomly generated cave that was not possible, and turned it into a legitimate level for fun. I spent a good amount of time testing and editing the level to play well, so it wasn't just a randomly generated cave
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I haven't noticed that there's a link to the Random Cave Generator in the header, are you gonna give me a link or what?
Unfortunately I don't think nearly as well. It might play better if you modify the tile weights (ie: More empty space), but I still think HatPC reborn suffers in this play style just because old HatPC is much more flexible in what the player can do
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How often are randomly generated caves possible or fun to play?
It depends on the parameters you give it. For the caves to generate well you usually need a pretty good balance of tile weights. Additionally, generating random caves using tiles & templates is much more likely to give you an impossible cave. If you just want to have fun, I'd recommend going tiles-only. Even if you do generate a cave that isn't fun or is just flat out impossible, it's super easy to drop the cave and just generate another one.
I think the whole play style beyond individual caves is just really fun to me. It's like exploring a cave. You'll try advancing in one direction, but then get stuck, backtrack a little bit, try hitting some other crate, opening up a new area, etc. This trial and error nature goes between levels; one level doesn't really work at all, so you just generate another one instead of continuing to struggle with it. That might be why I like it so much
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Are robots going to replace our jobs making caves?
Until advancements are made on randomly generating fun HatPC Reborn levels, I wouldn't be too terribly worried, but I would still be mildly worried.
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Are you gonna explain how the tool works? (as in what the inputs do)
You can probably figure everything out pretty easily, but...
The "Tiles & Terrain" Dropdown:
"Only Tiles" - Generates a cave by filling in empty space with randomly selected tiles (Recommended for having fun playing randomly generated levels)
"Only Terrain" - Randomly generates a cave template
"Tiles & Terrain" - Randomly generates a cave template, and then fills all empty spaces with randomly selected tiles (looks coolest)
The Tiles field dictates what tiles are used and at what weight. For example, if you use "zzzxx" 60 percent of the tiles generated will be secret areas, and 40 percent of tiles generated will be terrain
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Are you going to talk about the cave template generator at all?
There's not too much to say about it, it's pretty neat and it generates templates that I think look pretty good. Getting it to work well was actually tougher than the random level generation.
But seriously I do recommend giving this a try, soccer and I had a blast when we did this. I can't speak for him, but it was probably the most fun I've had playing HatPC, just going through a rapid fire of levels and seeing if they work, seeing how well other tile combinations work for generating random levels, etc
I can't imagine that this cave design was entirely random, because it does flow quite nicely.
Welp.
This is really cool though. I obviously had no idea that the cave was randomly generated, but it was like you said, surprisingly fun. I wonder if someone could make a more advanced program that would randomly generate boulder puzzles?
I'd say that your post there made some pretty solid observations. I was pretty surprised at how well some of the levels came together in terms of how you progress through the level. Often once you actually get started in a level, it actually plays like a genuine level.
The "bouldersNBoxes" preset in the header creates boulder mazes, which I've gotten some pretty nice caves out of. That doesn't exactly sound like what you mean, but I'm not exactly sure what you mean
Like I've said, terrain & tiles looks the coolest, but IMO, if you're actually playing the levels, Tiles only is more fun because those levels tend to be possible much more often and give you a lot more freedom in where you can try to go. Which also ties back to improved possibility; if you go down one path in Tiles only, and it doesn't work out, you can back track again. When that happens in Tiles & Terrain, you're usually screwed because the part that's impossible is at a choke point and there's no way around it. You'll also find that sometimes the door spawns in an entirely different cave section.
But I mean, you can always do what I did, and take a pretty neat Tiles & Terrain level and edit it into a playable user-friendly level. But I just really like binging on playing randomly generated tiles only levels
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I dislike tiles only because you have too much freedom. It's just aimlessly wandering and hoping it works. When a path is impossible in tiles and terrain you can take a different path as there's usually at least two paths and if it's at an intersection approaching it from a different angle usually works. (although I can't deny more tiles and terrain levels are impossibly than only tiles) (also you can just look at the map to see if the door is accessible without eve playing so that's not really a problem)