Mastodawn

More Terraria play. The shaded backplane is something I usually do for my platform engines. It could have some fancy shade and light effects I suppose.
Hardest part programming this sort of game is probably making enemies which can challenge a player that can alter the terrain, but then again Minecraft gets away with having enemies not being adept at climbing and digging. MC relies on jumpscare spawning/dropping stuff behind the player's back though. Not easy to plan for, which is kinda meh.

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AndroidArts Sep 24, 2023

Maybe a 1024^2 map? Dictionary compression won't work well for random terrain I'd think. I'd probably store the map using horizontal RLE, because of the flat ground and sky... and maybe sediment structures could have a horizontal bias. Tile noise and corners/edges could be handled deterministically after load (as noise won't compress well).
Less common tile types could use a branching exception code in the RLE format.
Very common rock tiles could maybe be 4 bit type, 4 bit length?

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AndroidArts Sep 24, 2023

Started noodling on a foreground terrain plane decoder, code prototype in BlitzMax. Would need a second pass for the BG plane. I don't really have any map data atm though, heh. Might reduce size to 25% or so of raw, at a wild guess. A 1024^2 map (or 2048x512) would normally be several megs raw (2+2 byte per cell in RAM, FG+BG).

https://pastebin.com/NTT36p6u

RLE map WIP - Pastebin.com

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AndroidArts Sep 24, 2023

An early map gen, just sliding a blobby line around (and a smaller deeper one) and eliminating orphan tiles.
Will have to make blobs for the flat surface and then a pass with dirt/rock sediments. Perhaps cave walls are more likely to be rock.
I think I'd prefer a much slower game where building and digging is very tedious (but rewarding). This might make the map feel more compact and homely too.