Thursday 23 October 2014

Game 08 - Random Silhouette Generator

The first project for my course requires me to develop a character as well as an environment. The first part of character development normally comes down to drawing lots lines on a photoshop canvas until it looks like a potential character, then moving on and doing 100 or so more.
I decided to play with the idea of randomly creating shapes since it's particularly difficult to express randomness as a human, so I made a random silhouette generator in game maker to do it for me.


Controls:
spacebar - generate a new silhouette
left shift - increase opacity
left control - decrease opacity

A compilation of some silhouettes I made using my software (Compiled in Photoshop)


The way the generator works is it creates a random number of shapes (within a range), the shapes then randomly turn into other shapes (for diversity), They then move their point of origin to a random x and y axis within the canvas, they spin around a random number of degrees and deform their height and width by a random variable (within a range) too.

Since the random number generator in game maker always chooses the same numbers, the software results in the same 'random' shapes every play, unless I change an argument or variable slightly between plays. Since then I've also added another variable that increases every step by 1 until it hits 11, at which point it returns to 1 again. This way, the player unknowingly has an influence on the generation of the shapes. Since it's almost impossible to time something to 1/120th of a second, the player should get different shapes every play. 

There is a 1/10 chance of getting the same first shape, but that probability reduces exponentially every shape the player makes and even then, it's not a big problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment