I’m participating in PROCJAM, a low-pressure game jam whose motto is “Make Something That Makes Something.”
What should I generate? I like photography, and I had an idea for teaching an AI to generate photographs of landmarks in a landscape. The player would walk through the landscape to the location where the photo was taken. Breath of the Wild and Skyrim both have sidequests where players try to find a location based on a drawing or photograph, and I enjoy them. I also relish the chance to pass some of my photographic knowledge on to an electronic protege. The player’s goal in my game is to replicate the generated photograph as closely as possible, so I call the game “Photo Copy.”
I had uninstalled the version of Unity I had used last year to create Spaceship Wrecker (play in your browser, blog post), and thought I might as well get the latest version instead of re-installing that one. So I downloaded Unity 2018.2 and set about trying to mock up some test assets: some terrain with landmarks on it.
I didn’t enjoy sculpting the terrain in the Unity Editor. I wanted vertical walls around the edge to keep the player contained, and thought it would be easier to make them by drawing a heightmap in an image editor. Alas, Unity only accepts heightmaps in .RAW format, and my image editors didn’t output to .RAW. I found a tool that could import a normal image (BMP, PNG, or JPG) and output a RAW, so I had to use 3 programs to get my terrain. GIMP -> L3TD -> Unity.
I needed normal FPS controls for the player to move around on the terrain. Surely something like that is included, right? Forum threads indicated it was, but those threads were old. Previous versions had “Standard Assets” included as part of the installer, but this version didn’t. I would have to use the Asset Store to download them separately.
Last year I used MonoDevelop as my code editor. Visual Studio felt like overkill, and it was another account to create, another EULA to accept. Unity 2018 dropped support for MonoDevelop. Visual Studio was my only option.
Because of this sequence of frustrations, I uninstalled Unity and looked at some cool photos from Burning Man. All the art installations and quirky camp themes are fun and inspiring. I started another Tracery project to generate some wacky camps. I’ve used Javascript and Tracery a lot, so starting a new project and getting some output was quick and easy!
I considered using Cheap Bots Done Quick, to put the output in a Twitter Bot, but I don’t see many benefits to that format, so I kept it on a local webpage. What a fun distraction that is not at all related to my PROCJAM project.
Feeling much better, I downloaded Unity 2017. Now I had the First Person Controller and could write code in MonoDevelop. Once i had the landmarks in the terrain, I made the first photography algorithm: place the camera in a random location, high above anything it might collide with, and point it at a random landmark.
It is technically a photo! That was enough excitement for day 1.