Inspiration
Our inspiration comes from our interest in indie game development. Procedural generation is currently not very accessible to small indie game developers and hobbyists. This generation technique is often locked behind high technical requirements or paywalls from proprietary engines/plugins. Our goal is to lower this barrier and allow game developers to start building procedurally generated levels.
What it does
Procedurally generates a mesh terrain using various mathematical algorithms, such as Perlin noise.
How we built it
We developed the front-facing web application using React and Node.js, providing a responsive and interactive user interface. The rendering and core visual experience were handled in Unity, which was exported using Unity WebGL. This allowed the Unity environment to run directly in the browser and seamlessly integrate with the React-based webpage, enabling real-time interaction between the frontend and the 3D rendering engine.
Challenges we ran into
We had trouble connecting Unity WebGL with the React frontend and getting them to communicate smoothly. We also had to limit user-defined parameters because terrain generation is computationally expensive and could slow things down. Finally, it was difficult to understand and adjust the Perlin noise terrain generation algorithm to create terrain that looked good.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of efficiently rendering the Unity build on our React frontend. We are also proud of our custom procedural algorithm. And most of all, extending the horizons of which indie game devs and hobbyists may pursue their passions.
What we learned
This project was one of our biggest mathematical and technical challenges. Because of time constraints, we had to abstract and simplify many parts of the system. In hindsight, the most important lesson we learned was the value of clearly defining scope and planning with strict constraints on time, computation cost, and workload to reduce stress and improve execution.
What's next for User Input Web Procedural Terrain Generation
We plan to extend our interest in undergraduate research with this project aswell as create a compatible and free procedural generation engine for most major game engines.
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