The VG Resource

That box head guy's jaw region is still kind of pillow shaded.

as you can see I've begun work on a weapon and an enemy, I'll be making the game dev topic when I've got basic combat.
you can see in the screenshots that the biomes generate rather nicely, I'll also mention it does this fairly quick (though it may get slower when I set it to find plots for camps / forts.
basic things like obstacles, traps and lesser enemy spawns are kept in an array next to the tiles activated when they get within 16 (32x32) cells of the view (this does scale with the zoom so I can stress test later on) I've used the system atm to render some crappy placeholder grass in moist areas (around water mostly)
I've also rigged it all up to loop so you can run out 1 side and you'll be at the other, though the transition is seamless so no matter where you spawn the world will seem pretty big and explorable.

so I've decided I need to make the transition tiles automatically, I'm still unsure how though.

okay so I think I'm going to reduce the number of biomes
vertically warm to cold,
horizontally dry to moist,

• 
  • Sand, Rock, Grass
  
  • Rock, Grass
  
  • Snow

this means only 4 biomes, but I dont really need any more.


I think I'll be keeping the grass tile maybe a little pallet edit but it works fairly nicely with the character sprites,
also as my friend calls it "that cute trapinch head" I will make an edit of it for each biome, make it your standard weakling enemy.

EDIT:

so I'm using the sand / rock as the initial tester, I'll then expand the checks to work between other tiles, as you can see most cases are covered except for special cases where both an edge and a corner are present. edges are checked first so an edge will always take its place, I may use this to my advantage to speed up testing, I can check if anything breaks the tile if so I can turn it into a regular corner and cut it off rather than making a bunch more tiles.

Here it is in action as you can see there are some issues in special cases, I explored the map a bit and with the current settings for generating the world most biomes are banded by their neighbours leading to little problems of this, so I'll be neglecting these special cases for a short while as I get the combat and world populating ready (enemy spawns, loot locations, fortresses, plant life)

Here is the tile sheet with the placeholder graphics, including all the transitions the game is using,
its a big texture so I stuck it in spoiler tags.
with some extra checks while picking the edges this is all I will really need.
but theres plenty of room on the texture to add in ruins pieces, plant life, buildings, whirlpools, etc. etc.

time to get that little chubby monster spawning in places and get some combat going.

this is a screen of 2 enemies pathfinding to me, I'm using a path finder I wrote for another project but the project died so I've re-purposed it, with some minor fixes and optimizations in place.
Combat isn't done yet hence no game dev topic yet, but this post is sprite related,
so the exceptions in the tile edges are starting to urk me, the more I think about it the harder it will be to fix while multiple tiles are in place, so I've been thinking of a way to fix the problem while still maintaining the same vastness,
should I cut the map size but add map types, I will then generating doors into transitional maps such as cave systems or for the sake of it a magicky space (hell, heaven, crystal land, icecream-topia, whatever fits) which will have an exit into another kind of area,
this way I can dedicate certain tile pairs (and variations on such tiles) to a type of map and not have to make the transitions in between each and every set.
I was thinking each area has 3 tiles, Dry Land, Wet Land, Water, the Dry land will always transition into wet land and water will always transition from wet land (wet land won't need transitions) this means I can keep the transitions fairly simple, no multi-mixing problems.
by making the areas smaller too it wont take so long to find the transition areas.

this ultimately makes the game infinitely more expansive, cleaner and easier to dev for.

TL;DR?
I'll be changing the biomes into a per map thing,
each map biome will have 3 tiles, dry land, wet land, water. Dry land transitions into wet land and water transitions out of wetland, meaning less tiles needed.
with this change I'll be making the maps smaller but via mini worlds such as caves, you will be able to find other maps within the same world so you can still find new area types (and such new enemies and items) by exploring.
also I have enemy path finding working and I'm half way through the equipment / combat system.

it took a tone of tedious switch cases but it works!


every possible case is handled! as you can see both water and grass transition into dirt, but dirt doesn't transition into anything, grass is the dry ground dirt is the wet ground and water is... the water!
combat is almost up and running I set up base classes for equipment last night, today I'll get some basic stuff and start hitting enemies, then I'll have the map generate enemy spawns as opposed to spawning the enemies myself,
this may not be a "rapid prototype" but things are growing fast enough, so long as I keep working it'll only grow faster.