Today I worked on mostly the non-procedural parts of the game. Of course the procedural generation is the reason I’m doing the jam, but I have to build a game around it so that other people can actually find and experience what I generate.
Updates to the AI photographer were minor. Instead of placing the camera completely anywhere on the terrain, I picked a distance from my selected landmark based on that landmark’s size. Distance and a random angle gave me X & Z coordinates, and I ray-casted downwards to place the AI Photographer on the terrain. That ensured the player could reach the same position.
Setting up the camera views were trickier. Unity can send a camera’s output to something called a RenderTexture instead of the screen. I thought I’d make a few of these RenderTextures, get the AI photographer to render photos to them, then display them on the UI. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that, despite clicking around in the Editor and the documentation for a while.
Instead I decided to have two cameras render to the same screen. On the left, the player’s view, controllable with standard FPS controls. On the right, the AI photographer’s view. There’s a key to hide the AI photographer’s view and fill the screen with the normal FPS view. There’s a nice transition where the FPS view shrinks and the AI photographer’s view slides in from the edge of the screen. In photo comparison mode, both viewports are square, regardless of the window the game is running in. Again, the player needs to be able to recreate the AI photographer’s photos perfectly, so the two views need to be identical.
With the cameras sorted, I was able to play the game! Even in its simple form, with temporary assets and no scoring system, I found it very satisfying to match up every little thing in the photo. I’m probably biased, since I really enjoy composing photographs with physical cameras, but it’s a good sign that this game is going to work.