Weekly progress post #76: Recipes
Posted on 2017-08-16 13:12
Today’s stream was kind of a silly one; I spent most of it working on a markov chain recipe generator. I had made the generator itself last spring, but the recipes I used then were written by random people and thus had fairly different ways to express themselves, making the generation less interesting. On top of that I was a bit uncomfortable with showing the generator off with the data being recipes ripped from the internet. Today I went and dug up an old Chinese cookbook I have and started adding recipes from that instead; the book is from 1984 and old enough that tofu wasn’t a common thing in the west yet (it’s referred to as “bean cheese”). Since the book is in Finnish, I had to translate it on the fly which probably butchered a lot of the grammar, but at least now I have something I can actually show off! As can be seen in the gif above, there’s a lot of repetition (I think I have 7 or 8 recipes in the database atm); I suspect there might be a bug in the algorithm itself because there are large parts of recipes that basically never show up in the generated ones. Gotta look at that! Fun projects.
Baba was also worked on; I implemented a level selection dialogue for when a level has a more difficult variant available. This has been on my to-do list for a long time now but various things (laziness, The International 2017) have reduced my motivation to actually get it done. The way the variants themselves are implement is terrible right now so that’ll need some looking at. As a nice side effect of this work, I separated the names of the levels into a separate file because previously they had been stored in a very nonsensical way that is somewhat hard to explain. Progress!
Tags: Games, Baba Is You, Procedural generation, Streaming, Regular updates, Other