There's that point in software development, where the features are totally great, but the execution is still a "bit" shoddy. And colossally slow. And you try to crank the map size up to a thousand units square and you are like "Yeah, that'll be so awesome" and Unity is totally like... dead. Just why? Hwhyyyyyyy!?!

Being an artist I didn't ever want to need to think about performance optimization. And memory management. I didn't want to know what the heap is. And what the stack. And why there's a difference between the both. And quite frankly, I'm not sure If I got that into my brain already. But anyway. I was fortunate enough to being able to get my hands dirty with scripting a few years ago. So that's when I started to get into programming. That's when slowly the beauty of concepts like performance optimization unfolded. So Monday was that day where I thought to myself "You really need to start to clean up that mess". Allright. I tackled the small things first. Merged a few classes and cleaned up the errors when they arose. Until all went fine and dandy again. So, that's where the messy part started...

Roguelites gained a lot of traction in the last years. Or more generally spoken, games featuring procedural content. Being a designer myself I have always been fascinated by procedural content generation. You know the argument... "Procedural can never be as good as manual". Can't it? Well of course there's a lot of manual design involved with games. But nonetheless, games like The Binding of Isaac or the upcoming No Man's Sky, among many others, promise procedural content or held to the promise already. And they are great fun. I though to myself "That's what I want to do." Then I looked at the underlying principles of procedural content creation. It's all math. Cool math. But... not very colorful and stuff. But hey! I'm using Unity. So there has to be something on the asset store already, because it always is. Yes? No? Wait what?

Since I didn't start this devblog from day one... shame to me... I've got to get you up to speed. So let's drop some information regarding the UI-Controller and Walkers. The UIController is a component that basically allows you to construct a procedural map setup in the Unity3D ui and save it as a prefab. I attached mine to an instance of  a 2D ToolKit tilemap from Unikron Software. An interface controller pushes the map values to the tilemap for better visualization. But you can really attach the PMap Controller to any GameObject. PMap creates the data for you. Nothing more, nothing less. What you do with this data is entirely in your hands.

But now let's take a look on the process. For the purpose of this article I'll use a Walker that was modeled after the common Game of Life Rules. What it basically does, is creating cave like structures by filling the map with values of solid (1) or empty (0) randomly and then iterating with a set of rules. Ok, let's add the Walker to the chain. PMap features a intricate system where you have UIControllers that don't really do anything by themselves. The real magic happens inside of the walker class, which is just a regular c# class. No MonoBehaviour, no ScriptableObject. I'll go through how this process works internally at a later time. But for now, all you have to do is add a new UIController Component to the Component Chain.

On May.13.2015v I released my first real track to the public. The Track is called Rome Tesseract. It pretty much sums up what comes naturally when I do music. Dark, cold, droning pads and epic soundscapes. If you haven't already, give it a listen on bandcamp or soundcloud!