Purpose

I originally came up with the idea for this game around 5 years ago when I first moved to London from Vancouver, where I grew up. I loved London for all that it had to offer but still I missed the endless forests of British Columbia. I wanted to create a game where I could stroll through an endless forest. This is actually the third iteration of this game and not the last, each one has a completely different style and has been a technical improvement on the last.

Features

The original concept was fairly simple. I wanted a procedurally generated mountainous landscape filled with procedurally generated trees. In the next iteration you were a canoer on a lake with a painterly art style. In this most recent version it is a return to the forest with low res trees and some full-screen pixelation.

What each version has in common was a need to asynchronously generate an endless landscape filled with trees and allow the player to move through it with gravity and collision. In the latest version I included a number of features that didn't exist in previous ones. These included snowy mountains, dynamic lighting through cloudy skies, and a day night cycle that featured the sun, moon, and stars.

Technology

I wrote every part of this game from the ground up in C++ using OpenGL for rendering. I used GLAD for loading OpenGL symbols and GLFW for windowing and input. I used libnoise for terrain generation.

I learned a lot while making this game about synchronizing threads and the finicky way you have to manage resources with OpenGL. Also I created some rather complex shaders and came up with some clever tricks for rendering a large scene in realtime.

I enjoy working with low level languages on high performance projects. Having to think about bit-width, data packing, and the way different algorithms will compile gives you a different point of view on the higher level problems. I find the arcane quality of working close to the bare metal in software very satisfying.

In the end I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I am proud of this iteration but already thinking about the next version which I will program in Rust using Vulkan.

Screenshots