For my Masters degree in 2009, I spent much of the summer working on an individual project. Based on an idea put forward by local game developer Midway Newcastle, I designed and implemented a tool that could take in an example building mesh and user-defined markup file, and then use these to generate an unlimited number of unique meshes of arbitrary dimensions.
The tool was intended to test out the idea of combining procedural generation and traditional artist driven mesh generation, with the ideas being implemented into a more complete tool to aid in the design of Midway Newcastle’s new, then unnanounced, next game project. I frequently met with Midway Newcastle’s Technical Director and Lead Technology Programmer throughout the project, in order to discuss progress and make sure I was creating a tool that was of actual use to them!
Unfortunately, Midway Newcastle were forced to close down towards the end of my individual project, so the ideas and implementation I came up with never got the chance to be used, and we sadly never got to see what would become of their new game, bar some very nice looking concept art. Still, I greatly enjoyed the chance to work on a real industrial project, and it gave me great insight into the inner workings of the game industry, and I’d like thank everyone at Midway Newcastle for giving me the opportunity.
One day I’d quite like to reuse some of the concepts and code I came up with during this project, perhaps combined with my procedurally generated landscape. It’d be quite neat to be able to generate a fully unique city at the push of a button!
