Grow! Defend! Restore!

We are currently working on Growing Wild - a cozy third person tower defense game.

Steam Page: store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/...

If you want to chat with the devs or others who like Growing Wild, join the Discord: discord.gg/T4qFmbeYXu

Be sure to check out our Steam Page for additional info (and possibly to wishlist 🌱)

store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/...

And if you don't know him! This is the renewshroom from our Plant Tower Defense Game Growing Wild! If you like the style or concept, feel free to follow us and/or wishlist!

store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/Growing_Wild/

Keep your distance. Stack your defenses.
And whatever you do… don’t let him through.

And of course, whenever you talk about SDFs, you need to give credit to @iquilezles.bsky.social

He has done extensive work on this topic and enabled all of this in first place. Check out his website for a lot more information on this, if you're interested! 🌱

We're currently in the process of refactoring this entire system because our requirements have outgrown our solution. That's not really a bad thing though! It gives us the opportunity to create an even more flexible and performant system.

By combining all of these fields, we can implement some cool emergent features, such as snapping plants to valid areas when trying to place them.

On top of the naturalized areas, we bake a bunch of additional information into SDFs as well:
🌻 The paths the enemies walk along.
🌻 The colliders of objects and obstacles in the level.,
🌻 The colliders of plants the player has already placed.

(These example images already utilize some of the interesting properties of SDFs in order to draw outlines and such. The most basic visualization would be a lot more boring and less helpful.)

If we run these calculations for a series of points - for example, every pixel in a texture - we end up with a Signed Distance Field. Then, other objects only need to look at the pixel that corresponds to their location in the world, and can quickly tell if they are inside or outside a certain area.

A negative distance tells us that the point is inside of the shape. You can combine these distance functions in various ways to create even more complex composite shapes.

Signed Distance Fields (SDF) are one of my favorite hammers in my toolbox and this seemed like a juicy nail to hit with them. On a basic level Signed Distance Functions are mathematical functions that, for any point in space, calculate the distance to a particular shape, defined by some parameters.

What we needed was: a system to manage and store this information, to make it available to other systems in our game, and to pass it on to the effects and shaders that display it in form of the vegetation, fog etc!

Oh, and they glow at night. Just saying. ✨

This little mushroom might not attack,but it’s doing some of the most important work out there!

You’ll need plenty of them to push the darkness back and expand your world — luckily, they’re as cute as they are crucial.