Project Lumbricina
Project Lumbricina (Worm) is a multiplayer PvP battle game inspired by the long running worms franchise. The motivation to create a game based off the beloved franchise was mostly brought on by a love of the games. However there are many other reasons I wanted to try my hand at developing a spiritual successor. One of many includes bringing the games into a newer evolution of technology. By using Unreal Engine 5 and it’s many technical flairs development has proven to be quite smooth. Also as much as I love the worms games new and old I’ve found there weapon catalogue has been quite stagnant. This is where the idea of community development enters the equation and the concept of involving the audience in the potential creation of weapons is really exciting.
Getting the basics right
After setting up the basics of Character movement, weapons, turn management and basic UI, Terrain Generation was the next big step.
In my eyes getting this terrain generator to work was the determinant of the whole project. If I couldn’t get it up and running I don’t think I would’ve continued with development as I think its such an important part. However the terrain didn’t need to just randomly generate but it also needed to be destructible.
At times this seemed like an impossible feat. I researched many different ways of possibly going about doing this from voxel based terrain to chaos destruction etc. In spite of that there was always something at the back of my brain telling me to do it myself. So I did.
I forgot about voxel, marching cubes, chaos destruction and decided to try and do it the most basic way I could. The result may not be the most efficient, fast or detailed but it works within the games fiction and was a huge achievement for this project.
Example video of my ever improving Terrain Generator