Happy holidays and welcome to newsletter # 16!
Hope your holiday season and new year are amazing!
Last few weeks:
The last 2 weeks have been very heavy focused on development of the procedural generation systems and environmental visuals. I really only need specific shots for the store page (that I could hand craft) but it would take nearly as much time to build the procedural generation systems so I decided to do that instead of throw away work.
I started by creating a simple walk algorithm that would randomly walk a path to create the main path then it would choose some random points along that path to branch from to make the remaining parts of the level. Its not perfect but it gives me a level where each room is connected to the other in some way. I’ll use a more complex generation method in the final game but the underline data structures will be the same so this lets me test environment generation using simpler methods.
Next I made a visualizer to see each room and how the rooms should be connected by doors. Yellow are top door connections and Green are bottom door connections.
With a simple level generated it was now time to fill it up with the real level assets starting with the empty rooms. I found that it was a bit difficult to see if things were generating correctly so I also implemented extra debug visuals that would indicate the main path (purple square), sub paths (green square), top level paths (yellow line), and bottom level paths (green line) that were generated so I would know if the assets underneath were correct. The north facing lines are also slightly smaller so I know which way is up.
The next layer of assets to add was the top floor which allowed players to move from one top level door to another. This involved generating unique door IDs depending on how many doors were on each floor and their orientation so I also added some debug text to see that info and the start and end of each level then added the correct floor to match the ID.
We then cut holes in the walls between rooms so when the doors are added, there wouldn’t be any wall geometry in the way.
The last step was to add random doors that would open when the player gets near. Some of these doors will be locked and will require you to find a key to open.
This is where I left off before the holiday break. I also added a bunch of code under the hood for filling up the rooms with challenges and rewards but I don’t have all that working yet. I will be able to show some of it to you on the next update though!
Push to store page release continues:
Working through my todo list item by item and I’m really liking how its all starting to come together. More to come soon!
That is all for this update,
Tony D
Cronoforge Studios Inc