Algorithms on Lorbic

Part 6: Simulating a Living Facility: Room Derivation, Sunlight Spillover, and Positional SFX

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0530

Generating a raw matrix of integer tiles gives you a map layout, but it doesn’t give you a living environment. When I loaded my first level into Derelict Facility, the engine had no concept of what a “Laboratory” or a “Reactor Room” was. It just saw a flat array of walls and floors.

If a player flipped a power terminal inside a room, I had no clean way to know which room lights or doors to toggle without scanning the whole map grid on every frame. If an alarm fired down the hall, it played at full volume regardless of where the player was standing.

Part 5: From Terminal Cells to Sprite Maps: Font Fallbacks and Auto-Tiling

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0530

Building a terminal-based engine in pure ASCII looks cool for about five minutes. Then you try rendering a complex facility map with corners, T-junctions, and status icons, and raw character cells start feeling incredibly limiting.

Two specific problems hit me immediately when I tried switching to Raylib for graphics. First, drawing wall tiles manually by hand in level files meant placing 16 different corner variations by hand. Second, when I tried rendering a 🚨 warning emoji alongside FiraCode monospace text, Raylib just rendered a missing glyph box (? or □).

Part 3: Casting Shadows Without Trigonometry: The Beauty of Integer Math

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0530

At the end of generating a procedural map for the Derelict Facility engine, I had a sprawling interconnected maze of rooms and corridors. But there was a devastating problem: I could see everything.

The entire map was rendered at once. It looked like a top-down blueprint, not a dark, atmospheric facility. I needed to implement Fog of War. I needed to treat the player character like a lighthouse in the dark.