It’s time to start developing our Pokemon´-inspired game. We’ll begin by generating terrain. Some details are specified below, but generating a good-looking map is largely a matter of taste.
Because it’s so much a matter of taste, you may decide how you want your map to look and come up with your own heuristics to generate that look. Things to keep in mind are playability and realism. Yeah, it’s a fantasy game where we catch monsters in tall grass, but that doesn’t mean there’s no realism! Paths that are too straight are probably unrealistic; after all, the world is full of rocks, streams, hills and trees.
Your terrain generator should be written with an eye toward extensibility. Remember that you will be adding functionality on top of this next week, and for the rest of the semester. For this step, you generate a map, draw it on the standard output, and exit. Here are the requirements:
• All code is in C.
• The map measures 80 units in the x (horizontal) direction and 21 units in the y (vertical) direction. A standard terminal is 80 24, and limiting the map to 21 rows leaves three rows for text, things like gameplay messages and player status, which come later.
• At least two paths pass through your map, one oriented N-S, the other E-W; these will intersect some-where in your map. Additional paths are acceptable according to your taste. Paths are represented using hashes (’#’).
• Your map should have a Pokemon´ Center and a Pokemart,´ Represented by one or more ’C’ and ’M’,
respectively. I make my Pokemon´ Centers and Pokemarts´ 2 2.1
• Your Pokemon´ Center and Pokemart,´ should be reachable from the path without having to go through tall grass.
• Your map should contain at least two regions of tall grass (represented with colons)
• Your map should contain at least one region of water (represented with tildes)
• The outermost cells of the map are immovable boulders (represented using percent signs), except that there is one exit on each border. Your N-S path goes between the top and bottom exit, while the E-W path goes between the left and right exits.2
• Your map should contain at least two clearings (regions of short grass). Clearings are represented using periods.
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• Other option terrain includes rocks and boulders (’%’), trees (’’), and whatever else you think would be interesting.
My approach involves randomly choosing a handful of “seed” locations for the various region types, then “growing” those seeds until the regions contact each other. Once the whole map has been filled, I favor region borders for path placement. To make the space more interesting, in addition to the required regions given above, I sprinkle boulders and trees around the map after regions have been placed.
