Greetings! This week I worked on important stuff. Don't worry its not secret!
I actually wanted to start to work on bosses this week, but I realized something was needed before: Layered Dungeons. So, without further ado these are the topics for today:
Layered Dungeons.
Improvements on "Fog of War".
Improvements on dungeon generation.
Layered Dungeons
So what are Layered Dungeons? They sure sound cool! Basically layered dungeons is a system I build in where I can layer/imprint 1 or more dungeons (usually not random generated) on a section of another (usually random dungeon). This allows for stuff like:
Generating levels with random layouts but specifics parts that need to be there (maybe somewhere where a boss lies).
Break the common dungeon generation and have a level with multiple dungeon types (open/roomed) in the same space.
Do some player guidance. I will show you an example of this with the layered dungeon created in the first level of the prelude (See images below).
In this first image, we see the path to the stairs blocked by innocent goo that handles our weaponless punches quite well. Do you notice an element that might come handy at the top of the image? That's right, a sword! What a coincidence ... or was it?
Once I grab the conveniently placed sword, the goo is no problem anymore! And I am ready to dive deeper into the unknowns! I am deeply sorry for any pro goo activist reading this.
Improvements on "Fog of War"
Is it actually called fog of war in this kind of games? Anyway this upsetting burning to the eyes sharp edged fog was greatly enhanced. You can see the comparison pictures:
Improvements on dungeon generation
As a side consequence of working to enable layered dungeons, I took the task to improve dungeon generation engine. Before the improvements building a 100 x 100 dungeon took like 8 seconds... way too much for this kind of games now a days. With the new improvements, creating a 1000 x 1000 dungeon took less than a 1 second, not bad.
An intermediate 150 x 150 dungeon fragment... already very big.
Sadly I realized that from game play perspective these huge dungeons drive you crazy. So unless it's for a special level dungeons will probably end up being 100 x 60 or something similar.
So whats next?
Ok, I think next week is definitely ready to be the boss building week. I got a good idea of the first boss mechanics. Stay tuned ;)
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Hope you like this development diary!
Till next Friday!