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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Forging The River in "The Flame in The Flood"
Speaker(s): Damian Isla
Company Name(s): The Molasses Flood
Track / Format: Design

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Overview: This presentation will cover the many techniques that went into creating the procedurally-generated river of the "Flame in the Flood", the survival "roguelite" from The Molasses Flood.
In the game, the player undertakes a perilous journey down a swollen river through a post-societal American South. Most of the game takes place on a rickety raft, with the player navigating around obstacles and through treacherous rapids, stopping occasionally to scrounge for food and supplies. The River thus forms the essential backbone of the entire player experience.
This talk will cover the major representations and algorithms used to generate the river, including a simulated-annealing-like optimization algorithm for island and river edge placement, a "cartoon hydrodynamics" scheme for generating and rendering water flow, and their approach to probabilistic resource scheduling. Throughout, the tight relationship between these various procedural generation processes and specific gameplay design goals across multiple timescales of play will be emphasized.

GDC 2016

Damian Isla

The Molasses Flood

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Design

Design

Programming

Programming