Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) (Patreon)

For the past few days I've been working on this in a separate studio file and I thought I'd share the progress here. It's still very early on, with biome or feature placement yet, but the generation itself is coming along better than I imagined.

In each image, a 5x5 grid of generated islands is shown. Their colors indicate their shape type.

The first image is when I finished the rough shape types, which are:

- Red: Random shapes placed and rotated near the center
- Yellow: Three medium sized islands
- Green: Four or more small islands
- Teal: A central part with 2 other parts offset randomly from it, making shapes like u, n, and s.
- Blue: A ring with varying thickness

Each shape can vary in height and also size. The first picture has "small" islands, but there are also medium and large sizes. The height and size are chosen separately, so there can be large flat islands, or super tall small islands.

After I was satisfied with the shapes and basic height, I made it so some islands can have "cliffs" instead of edges, like the island in the 2nd image.

Then I added another step to generation which can add random higher levels to the terrain offset from a base part of the island, which is something I usually do when manually building islands to add more variation. (Shown in 3rd pic kind of)

In the fourth image I started adding the feature placements for the island, such as grass layers, locations for trees and rocks to spawn (brown and black squares), and areas where ground features can be placed (large green squares). For now, these are uncolored and barebones, since the island's biome will be determined after its initial generation. (For example if its an icy biome, it would generate pine trees and change the grass to snow, and generate snow piles)

Earlier today I also added an "extreme" modifier to the island generation which can sometimes happen, which causes spike-like hills to form like in the final 2 pics

Right now I'm working on adding small caves, waterfall spawns, spots for mini structures, and lakes to the generation, then I'll be adding the biome types. I'm super excited for how they'll turn out at the end cause I really didn't expect them to be able to look this good, before I started I was assuming at best they'd be a large flat area with a few trees lol