Programming Blog 08 – Do you want to build a ship, man?

Hello everyone!

As previously mentioned, the ship in Monstrum is procedurally generated, meaning the layout will be different each time you start a new game.  Up until recently, the game would pause for a few seconds whilst the ship was generated – fine for development, but for release we need a loading screen that keeps the game responsive.  One solution is to run the ship generation over multiple frames, by pausing the generation at reasonable points to let the loading screen update+render, then resuming the algorithm again.  The transition to this technique went pretty smoothly (well, hello there coroutines), but, more interestingly, a by-product of achieving this means we can watch the ship generate itself!  Pretty cool, huh?  Gif time!

And another!

Let’s switch off the lights and have one last look:

Hope you liked these dev-gifs!  Goodbye!

Andrew Bean