For undisclosed reasons, I’ve whipped up a simple minimap example that would work well in a dungeon crawler type of game. It took a bit of thinking but it’s a relatively clean and effective way of showing the player where they’ve traveled so they don’t get too lost.
Here’s the link:
I saw @Mhx_Aîr had a concept for an automap he talked about a while back and I based my design off of some points he made so I just wanted to give him some credit for giving me something to work with.
Amazing, but an idea to add… maybe having bonus squares to represent walls, and even have some more red dots for enemies, that also move around on the map?
I’ll play around with this eventually and try to tinker with my own little ideas, since I do that a lot.
Just noticed this, and it’s interesting to see how someone would interpret my old middle of the night rambling into an actual game. I would suggest changing the 20px = 1px map to instead be 32px = 1px, since flowlab uses 32x32 pixel grids and every object square is 32x32, so you would probably get the most accurate map translation by doing it that way. Also congrats again to winning flowjam. If you were able to understand my nonsense meant for advanced users, and you won a flowjam, it might be worth us keeping an eye on what you make next ~
My Flowjam game Reactor 7 used a somewhat similar idea, but it doesn’t actually create any blocks and just uses the grid coordinates directly. The List blocks weren’t around when @Mhx_Air posted the initial idea, but I was able to use one to keep track of what Mhx calls the “chunk map” coordinates directly in the logic. Basically it works like this:
In your head, picture an 8x8 grid, which is where our “chunk map” will live
Create a List block to hold the chunk map. The list will have up to 64 elements (one for each of our grid of 8x8 chunks, rows then columns)
Start in the center by populating an element in the center of your chunk map (I chose element 27) and set it to “1” (or any other value)
In a loop, depending on how many rooms you want to populate, randomly move either up one row (subtract 8), down one row (add 8) to the left one column (subtract 1) or to the right one column (add 1) and set that element to “1”. I did this by checking for duplicates and appending to the List, but that’s dumb. The better way is to just set the element directly.
After going through step 4 a bunch of times, you’ll have a a bunch of connected chunks. I then just went though the list afterwards and spawned an entire pre-generated room for each chunk, checking the chunk map each time to see if it was connected to another chunk in each direction.
The logic is all in the Map Gen object if anyone wants to see (or use!) it:
Another upside of having that chunk map is that you can use it for a minimap, as @Greggo demonstrated. If you connect the the following links in the Map Gen, it will spawn a mini-map as the map gets built:
