I made some changes to my crawlers. They still follow the same 6 rules as before, but I changed it so now turning and backtracking along a path no longer take up the crawlers "step", so now they all find alternate paths much faster. This was a design choice the first time, but I like it more now.

I also got rid of the hard coded step distance, so now crawlers can move any number of spaces in a step instead of just 2. I used 2 so the paths are spaced apart, but there is no reason they have to be. So now I could do a very inefficient flood fill with crawlers.

Crawlers can now change the color of the trails they leave behind.

The mouse can now spawn crawlers too. Which lets you do cool stuff.

You can play with Crawlers yourself here.

I made some changes to my crawlers. They still follow the same 6 rules as before, but I changed it so now turning and backtracking along a path no longer take up the crawlers "step", so now they all find alternate paths much faster. This was a design choice the first time, but I like it more now.

I also got rid of the hard coded step distance, so now crawlers can move any number of spaces in a step instead of just 2. I used 2 so the paths are spaced apart, but there is no reason they have to be. So now I could do a very inefficient flood fill with crawlers.

Crawlers can now change the color of the trails they leave behind.

The mouse can now spawn crawlers too. Which lets you do cool stuff.

You can play with Crawlers yourself here.

I was inspired by the cool temple wall art by MrTedders and wanted to make my own. His was done by hand, but I wanted to make something similar using the computer. I have a lot of interest in computer generated content and this case seemed like a perfect opportunity to use it.

I want to use these techniques to generate some interesting patterns for game development. Maybe not this particular pattern, but something.

I made this pattern with a bunch of what I called Crawlers. Basically a crawler is a little bug that leaves a trail behind it as it walks around and keeps track of where it has been. My crawlers follow a set of very simple rules to make their patterns:

1. If the space in front of the crawler hasn't been covered before, move into it.
2. If the space has been covered turn left.
3. If the crawler has turned in a complete circle, it is stuck. It should then go back to the last space it was on.
4. If the crawler gets all the way back to the space it started at, it dies.

1. There is a small chance that a crawler will randomly turn left that grows the longer the crawler has traveled in a straight line.
2. A crawler may randomly spawn another crawler at its own location facing to the right.

Those 6 simple rules generate random patterns that look like this: