I spent more time after the stream the other day tweaking the plants and caves, setting specific colors , adding little details like ground "splotches" and shadows beneath the rock homes.

Today I spent time implementing animation, which meant that I needed to add a way to mark when vertices are "connected" to each other so that if a vertex moves, any other vertices attached to it also move. It took some tweaking, but I made a VertexConnection class:

class VertexConnection
{
    public:
    VertexConnection()
    {
        baseIndex = -1;
    }
    int baseIndex;
    std::vector<int> connectionIndices;
};

I originally wrote it to point to specific vertices but it seems like the addresses of those vertices in the vertex array changed after set up. The vertex array is a member of the class, so it shouldn't be changing its contents (I would think?) but I did a workaround where I referenced the indices instead. During the setup of creating the graphics, I'd keep track of what vertex was connecting to another, and add it into the ProceduralObject class family's std::map<int, VertexConnection> m_vertexConnections; like this:

tipIndex = m_vertexArrays[0].getVertexCount() - 1;
m_vertexConnections[tipIndex].baseIndex = tipIndex;

Then, when the object's update function is ran, different animations can be done by manipulating x,y coordinates. For example, the tree coral just shifts a pixel in either direction:

void TreeCoral::Update()
{
    IncrementFrame();
    if ( m_currentFrame == 0 )
    {
        for ( auto& v : m_vertexConnections )
        {
            float xChange = chalo::GetRandomNumber( -1, 1 );
            float yChange = chalo::GetRandomNumber( -1, 1 );
            m_vertexArrays[0][v.second.baseIndex].position.x += xChange;
            m_vertexArrays[0][v.second.baseIndex].position.y += yChange;
            for ( auto& c : v.second.connectionIndices )
            {
                m_vertexArrays[0][c].position = m_vertexArrays[0][v.second.baseIndex].position;
            }
        }
    }
}

This works pretty well and I was able to add animations to each of the plant types and I made a slight bobbing animation for the cephalopods (who I really need to name...). The result is this:

So now, still building all the graphics out of triangles procedurally, I think that I have an actually decent looking aesthetic. This was my first challenge - to try to build a scene to try to come up with an idea of what the game would look like - would I even want to go with no bitmap sprites for graphics? And I think I'm pretty happy with this. I can continue expanding and adding onto the game by adding additional children of the ProceduralObject class, I don't have to do a bunch of spritework, and also playing around with vertices gives me a chance to explore and experiment, making the coding process more fun for me.