City Quest Grid Layouts | Patreon Weekly #331

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share some early concepting for the overall layout of the city quest area. There’s also a new poll this week, focusing on potential changes to various little annoyances that have been reported to me over time.

(This weekly is mostly recycled from Shattered Secrets #49, so some Shattered Patrons might find it pretty familiar. There have been some adjustments though, in particular the last image has more elaborate room shapes now.)

It’s been a little while, but back when I talked about my current plan for the city quest, I mentioned The Gauntlet from Old School RuneScape as a design inspiration. (images courtesy of the OSRS wiki)

The Gauntlet makes use of semi-random level layouts, just like Shattered. These layouts are quite a bit more regular though, with the entire gauntlet taking place in a 7x7 grid of evenly sized square rooms with the boss in the center and minibosses at the edges. The player wants to build up resources by clearing rooms and fighting minibosses before they challenge the main boss. I actually really like trying out this sort of more rigid grid-like level, although Shattered definitely shouldn’t follow how the gauntlet is laid out exactly.

I’m currently considering a grid of 8x8 rooms (or maybe 9x9 if I wand them to have center tiles). If they’re in a 5x5 grid, that would make for a total level size of 44x44 (including gaps between rooms). That does feel a bit big, although the more rigid structure might make traversal faster. There’s also a possible option of making the raw size bigger (e.x. 6x6 or 7x7) but not filling in all of the grid spaces.

Here is a very loose mockup of how one of these levels could be laid out. The quest area would progressively become more dangerous as they players move from their spawn point (green) toward the boss (red):

Lots of work needs to be done from here, but this gives a decent impression of how a level like this might look. Probably the biggest thing to figure out is how these room layouts can factor into gameplay, as currently they're just all based on simple shapes. Decisions like whether grass/water will spawn here, and if there should be a bigger emphasis on terrain that the player can use against enemies. Enemies probably won’t respawn or wander, so there’s also questions about how the player would use the whole level vs. individual rooms to manage fights.