Grid Level Layouts | Patreon Weekly #341

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’ll be giving an overview of how I plan to specifically structure the upcoming vault level! There’s also a new Patreon Poll this week, with this year’s survey about which rewards you enjoy the most! Lastly, there’ll be an Audio Q&A next week, you can ask questions for it here or on the Patreon Discord!

This week has been a little slow as well, as I’ve been spending time preparing both for the holidays and also a new computer that I’ve been building and preparing to switch to. The time sink isn’t so much in the building of the new machine as it is in sorting and organizing about 6 years of organizational mess in my current computer, rather than just copying it all forward blindly.

I have made some progress on layouts for the new vault area though! Firstly, as a quick recap, levels in Shattered are currently laid out in either a circle or figure-eight patter with variable room sizes, tunnelways inserted as padding between rooms, random branches for variety and to house special rooms. I wrote a blog post about levelgen in Shattered several year ago that are still mostly accurate.

The caves quest actually uses a figure-eight builder, but with only heavily filled in cave rooms and without any tunnel rooms between them. This makes for a level that’s really dense and chaotic in its shape. Because the game’s levelgen logic is fairly flexible, it’s pretty easy to take the base figure-eight shape and make levels that look wildly different based on different parameters and room types.

The city quest is a bit different though, with no tunnels, rooms of a static size (I’m aiming for 7x7 currently), and all rooms aligning to a grid. That doesn’t really work well with the existing loop-based shapes for laying out a level. It’s also less necessary, as a grid ensures rooms will be constantly next to each other, giving us a relatively high degree of interconnectedness as long as the system has some parameters to ensure rooms aren’t placed in totally different directions from eachother.

Here’s a quick proof of concept to demonstrate what I mean:

This is largely made hodge-podge out of existing parts, using a heavily modified level builder with branches only. It doesn’t work very well, but is actually laid out using the levelgen algorithm instead of being hard-coded like the current vault room. Even though the shape is pretty random, it ends up being pretty interconnected just due to the limitations the grid shape imposes.

Obviously what’s really needed here is a new level builder that's made from the ground up to work with this grid concept. The builder will have some new limitations, but can also completely skip things like trying to figure out angles and room spacing, as the grid handles all of that automatically.