I’m about to start working on my 7drl project for 2019: Get Well Soon. It will be a deck-building, but otherwise traditional roguelike, in the sense that the world is square grid, gameplay is turn-based, levels are procedurally generated and you have to restart if you lose. All character abilities will be activated by playing cards. The character can be upgraded by adding and removing cards from the deck.

Wave Function Collapse is a procedural generation algorithm which produces images by arranging a collection of tiles according to rules about which tiles may be adjacent to each other tile, and relatively how frequently each tile should appear. The algorithm maintains, for each pixel of the output image, a probability distribution of the tiles which may be placed there. It repeatedly chooses a pixel to “collapse” - choosing a tile to use for that pixel based on its distribution. WFC gets its name from quantum physics.

The goal of this post is to build an intuition for how and why the WFC algorithm works.

Here’s a summary of the things I made this year - mostly libraries and experiments relating to games and computer graphics. Many of these projects deserve a dedicated post explaining them in further depth, and I intend to elaborate further in future posts. All these projets are written in rust. Headings link to the projects on github. All animations are realtime screen recordings.

Wave Function Collapse Library

Wave Function Collapse is a procedural generation algorithm which takes as input a list of tiles, rules describing which tiles may appear adjacent to one another in the output, and the relative frequency with which each tile should appear in the output. A common way of specifying this input is in the form of an example image which looks similar to the desired output.

Meters Below the Ground is a short tactical dungeon-crawler about escaping from an insectoid-infested facility. Complete objectives to unlock more meters for your character so you might stand a chance against the alien threat.

It is my entry in the 7 Day Roguelike game jam for 2018.

Play or download Meters Below the Ground in its itch.io page.

View the source code on github.