Hey everyone! Just wanted to clarify after getting some comments, MANY have used wave function collapse, I do not claim to be the first. I do think my application here (creating chunks with different patterns, then using a third pattern to stitch them together) to allow multiple different input types is new. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong though! Sorry for the confusion :)

Watching indie devs discover wave function collapse for world generation is always interesting to me for some reason lol. Its becoming so popular.

It was super fun to work on it! Im glad that the music works well and great work with all of the updates! Can wait for more! 😊

part of the value of waveform collapse is that you do NOT need to generate the entire final island one go. So long as you have fed it inputs that are not prone to collisions you can just pick a starting point and run until you have a large enough plot for starting out. then you can continue to run the waveform collapse in the background as long as needed

Another algorithm that's essentially the mother of WFC, (or, to put it another way, WFC is a specific case of it), is graph rewriting. If you represent your world as abstract nodes within a graph, suddenly you gain immense power in generating your world, and can do anything from generate levels with complex rules, to procedural loot generation, to managing your quests and dialogue. Graph rewriting works by representing everything as either a node or a path, then creating rules for how those nodes get joined together by paths. A great example of this is the game Unexplored, which used graph rewriting to generate all of its everything, but its levels in particular are very well done, as they're complete with traps and puzzles in a way that makes intuitive sense. Graph rewriting is the mother of all procedural generation, and it's only the difficulty in using it (you have to be very creative in designing your systems) that stops every game ever from using it for everything ever. EVEEEEEEER. TL;DR: Graph Rewriting is really cool, and supercedes all other procedural algorithms in both capability and difficulty of use, but is well worth the effort if you're smart enough.

the world generation stuff is cool but that demo from Ricardo is OUTSTANDING and he nailed every bit of input you gave him

this game looks really good, and the new biome generation is something i've never seen before. the character design is super cute, but i think it would look better with hats that you can choose. one of the hats could be a potato hat. edit: i noticed armor was next on your list, that sounds like the perfect time to add hats and maybe a potato hat

Great progress! I wouldn't throw the unintentional idea of wood dungeons quite out yet. On a smaller scale & with a different pattern I can see human forts as small outposts perhaps? Something that pops back up even after "clearing" an area for longevity? Also love the new music! I hope the full soundtrack will be a thing added to the steam store once you're doing the full release.

I know it'd be a lot more work, but if your concern is biome boundaries why don't you create 'transition biomes'. If you're making a rule that says only specific biomes can be next to one another, then you can create a special biome that looks like a smooth transition between the two and use that blender method you mentioned to stitch them together. So beach > water = shallows, beach > grass = dunes, grass > trees = scrub, etc, etc... Because you've limited the number of zones that will be in contact you don't need to worry about the huge number of variations that would arise otherwise and you can make the transition zones vary in width to make it more seamless.

Im in love with the music, definitely gives off that terraria/stv vibe and in my opinion fits pretty nice with the game

The game is looking awesome. I love the music too...the composer nailed it.

Just been catching up on the Dev logs and was really surprised to find an upload minutes after I finished the other one! This is whole game and your Dev process is fantastic. Keep it up.

This was honestly one of the most interesting dev blogs that I’ve watched so far!

That was a great explanation and visualisation on how the wfc works =D! I have a good friend who absolutely loves proc gen and I learned about the wfc initially from him. It's a really cool rabbit hole to Fall down to! Seeing you figure out the System, optimization and such was fun and I'm looking forward to more =) (The music sounds great as well! Feels like it fits your project =))

in your last video you talked about multiplayer and the difficulty sharing the map. If you can make your random level gen consistent based off of a seed number than you can just share the seed. Maybe do a checksum on the generated level as a validation.

Thanks for sharing your methods of developing your landscape! The shared snippet of music was excellent and felt spot on.

honestly the best timing possible I'm super interested in procedural generation and the like, and was actually thinking of how WFC could be used to make terrain like this like a week ago amazing video, keep it up!

This is really cool, great job! One thing to point out is that WFC is not deterministic in the same way that a noise generation algorithm is, so be careful if you are planning pseudo-infinite worlds (something akin to minecraft). For example, if you wanted to teleport to a location 10,000 units away a noise generation algorithm can start calculating the terrain instantly at that location, and it would be the same each time you recalculated it based on the seed. For the WFC algorithm you would need to start generating from the origin until you eventually filled in the section you are trying to teleport to, which may take an extremely long time or your computer would run out of memory. Because of this I would recommend keeping your worlds to a reasonable size, and perhaps if you want bigger maps make a break between each of these large sections so that they aren't continuous. Anyway this is my first time seeing your project and it looks great! Good luck, I'll sub to watch your progress and root for you.

First of all, I love what you're doing with the game. I will also say, at the beginning of your video, you said this was a new way to use WFC, but i think a lot of game creators have used WFC like this. It kind of make you look like you arent aware of what other creators are doing in your space. Perhaps your vewers arent watching other videos on this topic so it probably doesnt matter that much. Also i think it would be cool if you shared some of the resources that you used for things like WFC, some source citing.

I have been thinking of using wave function collapse in my RTS project, and I was going to use ECS as my whole project is built in that already. So thank you, for at least indicating I'm not entirely barking up the wrong tree. The game looks great, I'm going to go check out your other dev logs, and I look forward to following your progress.

Everything's looking so great! Thanks for the detailed info on the procedural algorithm's. I Found it super helpful :)

I love the tight corridors makes it feel like if you rush your gonna have a bad time But I also think you should make the loading screens just little gobby helping around town or building houses

You should make the hot bar moveable from the bottom to the top

I just found your channel, this is all super impressive stuff! Love the style and ideas, keep up the great work!

Interesting stuff! The dungeon gen is going to need some wider hallways though. I was getting claustrophobia just looking at them.

This game is gonna be so cool once it releases! I will definitely be getting it once its out!

Very cool generation tool. Also, great choice of music composer! It sounded great. :)

The video quality is absolutely amazing! You deserve more subs. Can't wait for the game to be released

You can apply Waveform Collapse at multiple scales. So you could simply look at letting your stitcher work on a smaller scale than your regular biome placement algorithm: maybe 2X2 or even 1X1. That would break up a lot of the "blockiness". You can also look at the more complicated version of waveform collapse that looks at 3X3 or larger patches and actually overlaps it's collapses to constrain the macro pattern more. Finally, you can tweak the probabilities of certain tiles on the border of other biomes by hand to make hard transitions less likely.

just found your channel, dev logs are so much fun ^^ its interesting to understand how much work a game actually needs. also maybe the music could be a bit slower...

You have a natural gift for explaining complex concepts! Thanks for sharing it with us.

Its very nice to see more devs use WFC and it generally coming into light. The possibilities are huge & there are quite some interesting angles/approaches that can be taken with this which eventually would lead to original types of world generation & games!

That music is 🤌

The goblins should live on a dungeon-like goblin fortress imo. It wouldn't be their only place but having it like this would help you separate them from the human invaders that would settle in the current style

I just discovered your project and find it super cool! please keep on going like this

Wow, I just watched your newer aseprite video, your sound design has improved in just 2 weeks! Very interesting subject to talk about to!

I always have great respect for artists that nail the theme and feel of what the games intent is. The pixel art and that music, so magical it brings nostalgia to me that I can't pinpoint where or why exactly. 10/10

I just started this video but my immediate reaction was to do it with machine learning because I'm a data scientist, but then you kinda described a manual and simple model type thing that really functioned more like a single chemical chain reaction. Then as you explained more my brain got excited cause I was recognizing the bones of basic machine learning, before you said it found the rules on its own and is basically machine learning. But then you mentioned it only takes an input size of one and my little coder heart broke because of the horror that is such a small database of probably only like a couple thousand pixels 😭. It was a great rollercoaster of emotions for only a few minutes in, but imma go watch the rest now 😅

Looks like a really awesome start! I'm really impressed with the results!

Good job! I think the world generation is much better now. Also the soundtrack is amazing.

The game is really cool but it could be cooler if it had seasons like winter and stuff, might be a little laggy but i dont know. Im excited to see if this idea gets added or not!

I know absolutely NOTHING about coding, but I'm pretty sure an app that spews out a "random" hexmap (using the mentioned wave function collapse) for old-school roleplaying would be incredibly cool!

nice work. live seeing how this is coming along.

Love the music sample! Ricardo did a great job with the prompts

For the odd patches of the wrong biome, maybe you could add a cleanup pass that removes any clumps of tiles smaller than a certain size and replaces them with an adjacent biome's tiles.

This is really good keep up the work, Cant wait to play the game, Its like 3d terrarria but youre the goblin and the terrarrian is invading, Like the style!

Wow the world generation is looking great and I can imagine just how varied a world your game could have now! Good luck with those future tasks.

Nice progression with the landscaping, love the music!

Just seen this project, looks interesting, and I love that you've shared your journey. That music is pretty awesome, gives the game a feel straight away.

WFC algo concept is very easy to understand, what becomes less easy to implement is backtracking when the algo gets stuck, and additional rules like guaranteeing paths between points etc. Tessera is a pretty good asset for that.

The music actually sounds pretty good. It was a little loud to me in the video but it honesty made me think of Zelda. Like with all games that look fun to me. If it ever comes to Switch I’ll get it. Don’t have a computer currently lol.

This looks great! Keen to see where you go with the game :)

Seeing a sponsor segment for my local university was a surprise.

I think it would be better if you had multiple samples for each biome because that would add more variety and make it feel more random.

As a rule of thumb, procedural generation is never easy, and there's always a tradeoff between performance, and intensive tweaking.

oh oh, I do love the music. it creates the perfect ambiance. congrats, as it is a pretty important part of a game, sometimes neglected.

I stumbled upon your channel the development process is really interesting Really excited about the game lunch

I love seeing WFC in more games. So much better than noise in most scenarios.

I swear I've seen multiple videos about this and the sudoku example really clicked for me, thanks!

OMG THAT SOUNDTRACK IS PERFECT AND JUST SUPER EPIC-NICE!

I am willing to guess that you will want to add some sort of tradesman eventually. I think it would be really cool if he were a kobold. Also, making a port/dock on the beach be something that he needs as a prerequisite to come visit, and the more prosperous your isle is, the more and better resources he will bring to trade. Just an idea. (Also, making the port/dock could make a fishing-inclined villager eventually start work on their own little dinghy so they can go a bit off shore to fish and get better products to sell and a higher quality of life.)

Really great progress! I remember watching a similar video on a guy using wave function collapse to generate maps for his game as well (ukposts.info/have/v-deo/jH9hiK5qrmuSw4U.html) I always hear about people using perlin noise, so it's nice to see people using other techniques like these :)

This was extremely satisfying to watch. Finding more efficient ways is a talent, very nice

Gorgeous music composition!

"Stitched Wave Function Collapse" sounds like something a scientist would assure you is safe 20 minutes before you're fending off headcrabs with a crowbar

Thats so nice, cant wait for next devlog

There is a guy named Martin Donald on youtube that made a video about wave function collapse already for world generation, so while this is not the first video on this topic, it is good to see what other people can come up with and explain.

the music from ricardo is amazing and it perfectly fits the vibe of the game (or in my terms, the music is absolutely banging)

Been interested in wave function collapse and been toying with it myself. When you started talking about your school commute and parking, I agreed because I had the same situation. It wasn't until you showed the picture of the walk up the hill that I knew exactly what school you went to because I went there as well. I walked up that hill too but the one to the engineering building was worse.

I’ve never seen wave function explained so simply, great video!

Its so fun watching you work on this game

The game looks beautiful so far, I can't wait to play it

Sending them good vibrations... Wave function collapse looks interesting. Current game I'm working on is pretty linear but sure will come in handy on a future project! Overall looks like the project is coming along nicely, good job :)

That forest music track is truely incredibly-well done! I'd be very proud to have that is my game! 😅

Thanks for the video, I am building a top-down game and your game's style inspires me!

I didn't know it until I just watched your video, but I used this wave function collapse algorithm at work to optimize a test framework for the operating system I used to work on. The system ran 10s of thousands of tests, scheduling the OS to be tested on different hardware for different features. We originally used a matrix to test almost every combination, but this began to take too long. Instead I proposed a system wherein we had constraints on how many of what kinds of tests needed to be run on different hardware, and then the system would schedule tests randomly based on the constraints that were still remaining, picking the tests with the fewest options first. Nice video!

this game looks so cool! im so exited to play!

that music is AWESOME!! Feels almost nostalgic.

this is developping my interest towards game design and i love it

I can´t express how good the music sounds. It´s epic.

Random recommendation on my feed, worth the click! Great work!

BRO THE MUSIC BOPS PERFECT FOR THE GAME'S THEME!!!!

Glad you reached out to Boris, his Tessera asset makes it really easy to implement WFC for those of us that either don't have the coding skills or just don't want to bother implementing everything themselves.

Glad more people are learning about wave function collapse. It's honestly the nicest way to solve a constraint system problem.

Music at the end is dope! Love it

A good level/map feels meaningful at every corner

I absolutely adore the fact that the music sample's rythm matches the taps of the little goblin's feet haha. So good.

Great video! I myself am currently getting into 2d game making (with pygame) and you really inspired me. Keep up the good work

This is what I needed. Thank you so much! I will use this to design how procedurally generated homes and populations for cities will be by describing the rules for what a NPC needs to "live" an in game life. What kind of home they would have, and how having a family effects the rooms a home needs or can have, and what items rooms should contain, and how item quality is effected by different social classes. This, mixed with NPCs who can talk to you with AI and have dynamic knowledge about in-game topics they "hear" as news should make for an interesting background, and be a relatively easy way to populate a larger space procedurally, so I can spend my human efforts working on polishing rather than hand crafting everything. Unreal 5.2 looks like it will be super helpful here too!

Very cool! This could certainly expedite my process when designing worlds.

So far I love everything about this.

I have an idea to possibly improve the quality of the wave function collapse generation but idk if anyone else has thought of it yet… I’m gonna call it Layered Wave Function Collapse for now, since I don’t know if it already has a name… Basically you run WFC in multiple layers. For starters you have your base layer WFC, where it picks the actual tiles to place and directly effects the world. But before you run that you go up a layer, have a grid of biomes and perform WFC on that, then the base layer WFC will fill in the tiles using those biomes to determine the tile set. So as an example say you have 3 main biomes: mountain, forest, and ocean. You would also need 3 additional biomes for the borders, beach, mountainside, and cliffs. It’s fairly straightforward to do standard WFC to place biomes to fill a map area. But each biome has an associate tile set and rule set. And for each cell in the grid you perform wave function collapse, possibly even in parallel with each thread only running WFC on a single biome. You get smoother borders because you define entire areas as a border that performs WFC to get from one biome to the next. I just had this idea at like 5am and I’m currently working on a different project so I won’t be able to try implementing this for a while, and don’t know if it would even work or give better outputs. That’s all a hypothesis that I can’t test right now…

Insta subscribed! It's super interesting to watch the process!

The WFC is great because it's the best way to approximate what our Universe is itself doing (or at least "the second half", aka the Cosmos) as it goes from "everything everywhere all at once" to "separate things in separate places at separate points in time" (as indicated with The Observer Effect).

I'm curious to see how this will progress ☺ Altough somewhere in the middel I felt a bit overwelmed by the technical side... also, a summery of what the game is about would have been nice. All and all, a nice video, keep 'm coming!

I was really digging the music, it sounded great

Love this , I am adding it to my wishlist and can't wait to play it!

The music is actually so good!

I been watching you for a long time now and never really commented. I know game design is niche but I would have thought you'd have more subs. Then I check to see you've only been doing this for a year. It feels like I've been watching you for 2 at least. Congrats on nearing a million views in any case :D Video was also helpful as well, thanks .

Great video! Love the way you illustrated the wfc process, it's perfect! Regarding the gobliny music: I think your composer did a bang up job at creating the vibe you were going for! I would say, if you want more ambient-ish music, maybe have the more distinct (lead) melodies appear more selectively / less often, and perhaps rely more on arpeggios. Try using motifs with few notes which can be varied by spacing the notes further apart or modulating up or down. This is also to help melodies not get stale or feel intrusive. Another little thing i will suggest is to be aware of the frequency space for when you want to add more sound design (effects) together with the music. For example: you might want to keep the high range (treble) less busy when it comes to percussion - this could be done with careful composition, choosing samples with less high end, or just applying a low-pass filter to the whole thing. The reason I worry about this, is that you never want the player to be confused as to what is a sound cue and what is background music/ambience. A good way to help this is dividing up the frequency space and deciding, for example, that all impact noises be low-freq, attack noises have high-freq, the music timbre sits mainly in the mid range, etc etc... this way the sound design will be intuitively coherent. Basically all I'm saying is just don't make the sound effects and any musical instruments sound too similar 😊 cheers!