Explore the boundless reaches of an alien world as an intrepid purple dot of ambiguous origins!

CONTROL a courageous purple dot who is probably a robot, maybe!
EXPLORE procedurally generated planets of curiously infinite size!
GASP IN ASTONISHMENT at a game interface that brings new meaning to the phrase 'pixel graphics'.

Do you dare brave the adventure? Can you afford not to?

---

TLoPD:E1:PDtE was my LD16 entry, on the theme of exploration. I originally wrote it under severe time constraints (more like 10 hours work than 48), and the version posted at the LD site reflects that. However, I've since been making substantial updates to it, and it's looking a lot more like a game rather than a toy now.

Check it out! Note that you should ignore the packaged downloads and just grab the ruby source. You'll need Gosu, of course, and also the gem mixology.

I love exploring random worlds, I just need a target to pursue :) Why does the loading take a while if you go to a new screen?

Loading takes a while because on each new screen it has to procedurally re-figure what belongs on that screen. This applies even if you've been to the screen before. Only the terrain for the current screen is stored in memory. Since the terrain is generated using Perlin noise, which always generates the same result for a given set of input values, the only thing I store in memory for regions other than the one you're in is the set of which tiles you've seen; even that in compacted into a bit string.

Adding to the delay is the fact that my perlin noise generator is a pure-ruby one; there's a readily available one written in C which would have been much faster (probably fast enough I could have been really extravagant and not even stored the current screen in memory, and just called the function as I drew), but I didn't want the headache of cross-compiling it for LD48. Plus, I got to learn about Perlin noise this way.