Entrance and Exit Adjustments | Patreon Weekly #255

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to share details on some levelgen additions coming in v2.4.0!

Firstly, a few other things:

• There’s a new Shattered Secrets this week! In this Shattered Secrets I’m going to share some high concept details for the cleric’s two subclasses!

• There’ll also be an audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord.

• I also mentioned that an alpha would be coming soon in last weekly. Things unfortunately got waylaid a bit as levelgen work too longer than expected. I think an alpha this week is very likely though, keep your eyes peeled for that.

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As voted on in Patreon Poll #51, some levelgen additions were due for v2.4.0. I’ll admit that I’ve had a little trouble coming up with some new room types for each region, but I have made some neat additions regardless.

The major goal with standard room additions is to continue introducing interesting alternatives to the current ‘empty rooms’ that make up about 2/9 of standard rooms currently in Shattered, and about 4/5 rooms in vanilla Pixel Dungeon.

One thing I noticed while reviewing this though is that the game’s existing entrance and exit rooms are currently still always empty. On one hand this makes sense, entrances especially shouldn’t be too exotic or dangerous as players need to get their bearings, but it’s still undeniably a bit boring. I’ve therefore spent a bit of time tweaking the game’s code, and it’s now possible for entrances and exits to be variable just like standard rooms

I’ve added a bunch of new entrance and exit variants to work with this system, based on existing standard rooms. I’d like to have 2 for each region by the time v2.4.0 goes to alpha. This will reduce ‘empty’ entrance and exit rooms to about 2/5 chance of occurrence. Some of these rooms can be large (8x8 to 12x12), but never giant (12x12 to 16x16).

I’ve also made entrance rooms more willing to merge with other rooms in the dungeon, but have made some guarantees that enemies won’t spawn right nearby to the entrance stairs. Entrances on floor 1 and 2 will always be ‘empty’, as new players need to focus on certain tutorial functionality there.

Lastly, a few of you might remember that I once considered adding unique entrance rooms to match boss exists from previous floors. I’d still like to do that at some point, but it’s not in the cards for this update specifically.

As for new regular standard rooms, I’m still fleshing a few ideas out, but am hopeful that I will be able to have one new one for each region by alpha time as well.