Procedural Island Generator

Throughout this project I developed my technical skills by watching over 40 videos and reading papers on procedural generation, branching into fields like procedural animation and procedural storytelling. One paper helped clarify exactly what PCG is:

I researched and followed tutorials repeatedly until confident enough to write my own procedural mesh. After several rewrites I produced clean, well-structured code with a polished inspector interface. Creating a custom island shader proved unexpectedly time-consuming due to limited tutorial resources on Unity's Shader Graph.

This was nominally a group project, but only myself and one other student (Mitchell) contributed meaningful work. Despite reduced participation, Mitchell and I gave each other useful feedback — for example, I helped assess the readability of his Day/Night Cycle. The experience reinforced the value of finding collaborators who are equally invested.

I'm pleased with the outcome, though I would have loved to add auto-scaling water assets for different island sizes and a procedural tree-placement system using mesh normals. The project didn't match my initial scope expectations, but after properly researching the topic I feel I achieved something solid and I'm proud of the result.

The biggest challenge was implementing a fall-off to the terrain generation. I tried Sebastian Lague's fall-off map method and got it working in isolation, but couldn't integrate it with my chunked terrain system. I eventually solved the problem using sine waves — a method I found through further research. This experience reinforced the importance of broad research when solving specific coding problems.

I'll continue improving across game development, Unity, and C#. In future group projects I'll be more deliberate about team selection. Most importantly, I'll keep setting myself challenges outside my current knowledge — the process of unpacking procedural generation significantly improved my coding skills and confidence.