A dyslexic's take on code

Avinders is a game that I have spent a lot of time on. Originally it was a project developed in a team of 5 at a HEADSTART course run at Aston University. On the course I was introduced to the three.js library and the ability to run plug-in free 3D graphics on the computer. From that I had the idea for a project we could present that should be doable in the time we had. The idea was that you could take space invaders and make it 3D so that the user could get a different perspective on the aliens attacking. Although we didn't win the competition, we did get a notable mention for the project has been “out of this world”, which resulted in us winning the equivalent prize of first place in the competition anyway. Quite the achievement. Over time and with a functioning version I decided to continue to implement elements that I wanted to add. The direction I was going for, although I didn't know it at the time, was something akin to the elite game from the 80s. The original game was...

I initially wanted this to be a post about some ideas that I had had for how one might go about creating the placement of settlements, particularly around a larger city ontogenetically. Unfortunately, it got a bit too long and I ran out of time. This is, therefore, the first installment in what will be a series of posts on ontogenetic creation. Screenshot from Dwarf Fortress while it generates the world. First, let me explain the word ontogenetic from the title. Ontogenic algorithms are those which allow a result of a process to be jumped to, without having to calculate the intermediate steps. A great example of this is the world generation that is used in games such as Minecraft. The computer can generate the world around a player wherever the player is, without having to generate all of the world in between. In Minecraft, you can jump to any point before the farlands and the computer will be able to generate that world as quickly as it could a place much closer to the origin. T...