Game 08 - Procedural Silhouette Generator

For ProcJam 2014 I've been developing my procedural Silhouette Generator. It's now much more useful with options to change the width and height of the generation area, the complexity of the silhouette and the shapes the silhouette is made up of. The opacity variation is now consistent between silhouettes.

You can download the updated Silhouette Generator from itch.io or right here with this widget

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.

LINK

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.