A world made in Blender

Until this summer, Code Rescue generated its whole world procedurally: terrain, streets, buildings, roofs – all from formulas and building blocks in code. That carried us surprisingly far, from the underwater district with its glass dome to the factory halls in the PHP quarter.

At some point, though, you hit a limit: a city that looks handcrafted is hard to derive from rules.

The new way

Since August, the island and the city are made in Blender. From there they do not enter the game as an opaque model file, but through a translator that turns the scene into readable PHP code and text-based mesh files. That keeps our principle intact: everything in the game is code or text and can be traced.

What the game builds itself – terminals, characters, gates, the ferry, the elevator – stays procedural and is placed into the imported world.

What came next

• Real point lights: at night the city glows where its windows and street lamps are.
• Surfaces with joints, cracks and relief instead of flat planes.
• Hologram boards that are readable in all 31 languages.