Ideas for Levelgen | Patreon Weekly #70

Hey Patrons!

Content Poll #10 ended last Friday, here are the results:
Levelgen Improvements:      87% Support
Alchemy Improvements:       67% Support
Equipment Improvements:  47% Support
Another New Challenge:       33% Support
There’s clear separation of support between every choice, with levelgen easily sitting on top! This makes sense to me, as the support for each choice is ordered based on how recently each has featured in an update. Levelgen has needed some improvements for a while now, so I’ll get to it!

I’ve actually had a few ideas about levelgen floating around in my head, so for this weekly I’m going to commit that to writing to let you know specifically what might come in v0.9.1:

More Merged Rooms

Before thinking about more deep changes, there are some easy wins to be had in improving some existing aspects of levelgen.

One such improvement is increasing the number of adjacent rooms with removed walls. These are the L and T shaped rooms from vanilla, and while they still exist in Shattered they have become much less common. A big reason for this is that they can only happen to small rooms that are totally empty. Shattered has a good number of larger and non-empty rooms that could have knocked down walls though. Allowing merged rooms in more cases might lead to some much more interesting emergent layouts. 

New Layouts

The game has primarily used a single, circular layout system since v0.6.0 (read more on that here). While it works well, and has been improved a few times since v0.6.0, it would be nice to have some more layouts. One thing to keep in mind though is that it’s important for levels to not have too many annoying dead ends. The circular layout works really well for this, and new layouts need to be careful to not drop interconnectedness too low.

One obvious choice is to take the figure-eight level layout from Goo’s arena and extend that to a full layout of its own. This might work particularly well for more structured areas, such as the prison and dwarven city. It’s also nicely similar to the circle layout, and so should keep all of its strengths.

A more exotic layout idea is one based on interconnected lines with a central room: a ‘web’ layout. This sort of layout should keep similar interconnectedness but would look quite a bit different. It could nicely fit some of the less structured regions, like the caves and demon halls. Care would need to be taken to keep the number of dead ends low though, can’t have too many lines going nowhere. This could be improved by doing things like stuffing special rooms at the end of lines, as those rooms have to be at a dead end anyway.

New Rooms

Finally, I’d like to add some new rooms as well! Mainly I want to keep deepening the distinctness of each region by giving them more unique standard room layouts.

One such layout that’s coming along nicely is a circular sewers drainage basin. This looks a bit similar to the circular pit rooms from the caves region, but with guaranteed water and walkways through the center. Here’s a mockup:

I also might like to give each region a unique entrance room in its first floor, to help better tie each region to the boss floor that came before it. These would likely be hard-coded, and so shouldn’t be too tough from a dev standpoint. Here’s a mockup of how that might look for the dwarven city: