Procedurally Generating Worlds in the Style of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing

Abstract

This is an investigation to answer the question ”How can you generate an Animal Crossing style terrain?”. Our aim has been to investigate the challenges and opportunities in terms of solving this task, while adhering to the specific style of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. We recognize the importance of world-building and its’ widespread employment in many commercial and research environments. In some cases it is favorable to generate a world as opposed to manually building it. With our investigation we are specifically targeting real-time applications, such as video games. In terms of procedurally generating worlds specifically in the style of Animal Crossing, little previous work outside of the games has been done. Our investigation is taking a step to fill that gap in the research. We approach the problem by combining a collection of know techniques, such as: heightmaps, Lindenmayer-systems, Depth-First Search, Poisson disk sampling, Simplex noise. We also combine them with our own solutions and introduce custom stylized visual elements, like graphical shaders, to shape the aesthetic. Our shaders use techniques like layered textures, displacement maps and scrolling textures. At the start of this paper we ask the question: "How can you generate an Animal Crossing style terrain?". We answer this question defining what the Animal Crossing style is and by showing how to apply specific techniques in order to produce such a result. By this we answer a number of things: Yes, you can procedurally generate terrain in the style of Animal Crossing; Yes, these worlds can be made suitable for realtime applications such as a game; Applying specific techniques in a certain way combined with some extra details, you can achieve these types of visual results which we believe follow the principles of the Animal Crossing style. Auxiliary to this we also provide insight into ways in which certain aesthetic features can be achieved, which may fit into a world following the style of Animal Crossing terrain.