The game felt lifeless and flat. There was no motion at all other than the player jumping from one block to the next. I thought, rather than having a flat black background I could add some texture in the form of a dark ominous fog, in the pixelated style of course.

I tried a couple of different images, tweaking the pattern, colours, brightness, etc. It was definitely better, but using a single static image didn't really feel right when everything else was dynamically generated. My first thought was to generate a tileable image on the server. Then I thought why not take it a step further and ditch tileable images completely and make the whole background a dynamic fog visualisation 🤔

I must admit, I didn't really know where to start with this one, I thought probably somekind of visual noise generator would be needed. I turned to Claude.

The result was a seeded 'value noise' generator with smoothstep softening. Say what you like about AI, but I never would've attempted anything like this without it, and now I've learned some really cool things.

There are three layers, a chunky/blobby layer, which gives an overall structure, a middle layer which adds some detail, then the fine layer which has lots of detail, and is quite busy. They are all overlayed to give a shockingly realistic misty/cloudy visualisation.

Try not to get stuck in the fog, down a hole, with a' owl!