cat in snow

TinyCat

BBS

PICO-8 Cartridges

cat in snow

by TinyCat

Cart #catinsnow-3 | 2023-12-24 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

a cozy lill' walk through some snowy woods
this game is mostly about atmosphere, so no objectives here. just walk around till you feel done :)

the trees

i'm real happy about how natural the tree generation feels so i figured i'd talk about it.
the trees start out like this.

the main thing that helps sell the forest is the random tree placement. but if we just did something like..

tree.x = x + RND(8) - RND(8)
tree.y = y + RND(8) - RND(8)

..then each time we re-spawn the trees for a area they would be in different spots then before. basically we need a function that returns a sudo random value y from value x. thats were this function comes in...

FUNCTION ConstRnd(_𝘹,_𝘳)
    IF _𝘳 == NIL THEN
        _𝘳 = 1 -- r meaning range
    END
    RETURN (COS(_𝘹*.6)+SIN(_𝘹*4.9)+SIN(_𝘹*.01)+COS(_𝘹*7.3))/4*_𝘳
END

here's a part of the function on desmos..

so while not totally random, it looks random enough :)
so instead we do something like this

tree.x = x + ConstRnd(y)
tree.y = y + ConstRnd(x)

the reversal of x and y is important, otherwise we get this banding effect..

beyond that, its just a matter of scaling the top of the tree with SSPR, placing some random sets of branches, and doing some random flipping of the tiles.