Level Layouts | Patreon Weekly #73

Hey Patrons!

We’ve just hit our $250/mo milestone! Thank you so much to all of you for your support!

It’s also about time for another content poll, but unfortunately I’ve been a bit swamped last week with helping my family (nothing serious), and so haven’t had time to work on either just yet. Expect October’s content poll and news about the first Q&A stream a bit later, by next weekly at the latest.

As for Shattered work, I’m just putting the finishing touches on those levelgen improvements!

Some Final New Rooms

Since last weekly I’ve worked on adding some more region-specific rooms:

The prison is getting a cell block room with a wide walkway around the perimeter:

For the caves I’m adding a room that’s broken into pieces by multiple fissures, with some bridges connecting them. This one isn’t implemented yet, so Here’s a mockup:

For the city, I’m adding a larger library room, which is reminiscent segmented rooms from the prison, but with more tight spaces:

I don’t have a final idea for the demon halls yet, but using chasms in it is likely. I was afraid to put too many chasms in the demon halls previously due to rushing, but that hasn’t been a significant issue since v0.8.0.

Lastly, I’ve decided to put the new entrance rooms on hold for now to save time. They were always more about visual flair than gameplay variety, and I want to get moving on talent changes. I may look to implement these rooms during the v0.9.1 beta if there’s an opening.

Finalizing Level Layout Improvements

Since last weekly, I’ve spent some time refining room interconnectedness and merging:

• Room merging is a bit more restricted now. Entrance rooms can’t be merged anymore, and standard sized rooms can merge with at most one other room. Large and giant rooms can merge multiple times though.
• The caves and demon halls can now replace the walls between two adjacent rooms with chasm! This was another piece of vanilla functionality that wasn’t properly adapted to new levelgen. This applies to any room that can be merged.
• I’ve also made some further tweaks to the existing loop layout to improve room interconnectedness. The loop builder still makes a distinct loop shape, but it’s a bit more compact and has rooms in the center more often now.

As for the layouts themselves, I’ve spent some time working on web and figure-eight layouts. Unfortunately, the web layout didn’t prototype too well, so I’m cutting it for now as I’ve already spent enough time on levelgen. I may revisit it later, but there are probably better layouts that could be added based on simpler shapes.

Figure-eight layouts are working excellently though! The figure eight layout ends up looking like a denser room cluster or a line depending on how the two loops take form. Having a form of line shape is excellent, plus the underlying figure eight structure ensures that such a layout isn’t too linear. I’ve also tweaked the layout to ensure that the largest room is in the center most often, which helps take some of the game’s more distinctive large rooms and make them a centerpiece.

I’m planning on putting all of this levelgen info into a blog sometime this week, and then moving on to talent design and implementation. At the current pace of things I’m hopeing to get v0.9.1 to beta in early to mid November.