Richard
@benjymous
'Veteran' from the AAA games industry, building small games and geotechnical engineering software. he/him. sing-song ding-dong, and Triston, both available now on @ catalog and itch.io
@bransonreese.bsky.social this spam popped up in my feed, and for some reason I thought of you
The final data is saved out as a Lua table, which takes about 200k of memory in the game (which could be considered wasteful if memory was tight), but the algorithm is fast enough that it doesn't cause a big delay to generate.
So, Exmouth, that's Ex mouth. The mouth of the river Exe. Likewise Cambridge. Bridge over the river Cam. Prefixes or suffixes - *North* Berwick, Barnard *Castle* - can be separated out too. Names can be split apart into chunks, giving us the building blocks to generate new names.
To crunch this down into something our humble Playdate can use, first I wrote a tiny bit of C# that extracted all the city/town/village names into a text file - that gets us down to ~24k lines, or ~340kb of data
How does it create these? Certainly not using any modern AI techniques - Procedural Generation is quite different from GenAI - it's actually a very simple algorithm, powered by a good chunk of manual brute force.
This is powered by a bit of code that can generate endless "authentically British" sounding place names.
So, in my little #playdate game Triston, when you complete a level, it has a little throwaway feature where it shows you the name of the place you've helped discover. #gamedev #indiegames
Here's some random gameplay footage of the little Match 3 town builder puzzle game I've been working on for the last couple of months. Triston is coming soon to @play.date #playdate #gamedev #indiegames #pixelart
Are you aware of these creepy things? All over my local gardening place. I'd imagine they're rife for hacking
I love that it's detailed enough that you can clearly tell exactly what computer the art was modelled off
I got this working in my little virtual computer - The screen has 8x8 cells with attributes (much like the Speccy) but each cell has 3 colours from the core palette, generating 16 shades than can be used within that cell. All this happens inside the shader - the actual texture is just 16 greys
I spotted this variant of one of my favourite multi-pencils is currently on sale: cultpens.com/products/pen... I already have a different model, but...
This is my fave - comes in multiple versions, some are just coloured pencils, some have a biro included: www.amazon.co.uk/Pentel-Multi...
Doesn't answer your question, but I've got a matching one on my desk that was found near a local park
In a long ago place, in a far away time, The villagers cast out one whose song didn't rhyme... Defeat the Mysterious Monsters! Retrieve the four Mysterious Musical Notes and collect the Mysterious Gems! sing-song ding-dong out now on @play.date Catalog play.date/games/sing-s... #playdate #gaming
