Skyland Windows, Mac, Linux game

Hi guys and welcome back to another devlog about skyland! Guess what I've been working on again... clouds! But this time it went pretty good. I simply adjusted the density of the clouds when they are near the lower limit of the world so that they obscure the cutoff from the waterfalls, because even though the world is infinite, there is a lower and upper limit. I also changed the shading of the clouds quite a bit so they have a little bit more depth. Usually you do this by adding some shadow samples to the raymarcher but I used a little hack which saves a lot of performance and needs no shadow samples in my case.

Combat is quite an important thing for this game and it has to feel good or the survival part of the game would just be bad. So in order to accomplish that I had to rewrite a little bit of code and come up with a proper combat mechanic. I decided to keep it simple for now so this is how it works: when you block and you get attacked it will reduce the amount of damage you get. How much the damage gets reduced will be decided based on your blocking item, the better it is the more damage it will block.

Cave generation is a topic that I avoided for quite a long time because I had zero clue how I should achieve a proper look. I searched around the internet and a lot of articles suggested 3d ridged noise so I thought I would give it a try and to be honest it worked pretty well... right?

Turns out that 3d ridged noise is pretty stupid in this case so I had to figure out a new strategy. At first sight it might not seem right but I tried 2d ridged noise. With the help of some more perlin noise which defines the position of the cave, it produces some lovely caves. I added about 6 layers of that noise to the world generation to get caves everywhere.

That's it for the last 2 weeks. If you want to get a more in depth look you can check out my video series over here: Youtu.be