Nothing new, my break isn't finished yet :p Just had fun making a .gif for tweeter, might as well share it here:
Thanks Hawken! Hope it will be.
Here is my first shot at making a randomly generated totally empty dungeon.
There is something truly fascinating about this.
So far I generate a "main path", meaning the player is guaranteed to be able to go from room 1 to room 64, but I will add alternate paths. They will follow the same logic, but will have a priority on going left, right or back, maybe diagonally. They might be dead ends, or reconnect with another path. More .gif later today!
No name yet!
Thanks Andrés!
Random gen is way more complicated than I'd like it to be, but it's funny. I think the dungeon by itself is pretty strong now, next step is single room generation with meaningful variations. Here is what a dungeon looks so far: 64 (more or less, there is still bugs to found) rooms of ordered chaos
Blue room: starting point. Pink room: exit. Green is the main path, guaranteed (pretty much...) to connect the start to the exit. Orange rooms are alternate paths, meant to force exploration, and potentially hiding treasures at the end.
I will make a few rooms automatically connect to every rooms surrounding, to break the linearity of paths.
Secrets room are also planned as a long term goal, with the appropriate bombs of course ;)
Now is a good time to go to bed and make myself ready for the final run. I'm afraid a lot of features and sound as a whole won't make it to the jam version of this game. On the bright side, it's the perfect project to put efforts in from time to time, so I'm really planning to make it big and long term!
Keep up everybody!
- Skaz
Couldn't resist, had to navigate one of the dungeons by myself.
Takeaway: it feels WAY BIGGER when walking from room to room than whatching the thing from above. So if you restrain player movement by forcing combat, or fiding keys in certains paths before progressing, a run could be really long. Might have to reduce the numbers of room for the jam version, maybe 32 will be enough.
I sped up the character a lot for the demonstration.
Thanks! I don't know if I'm fast, I feel like I loose a LOT of time.
Not much to show, I have debugged and streamlined the dungeon generation, 99.9% guaranteed to be finish-able based on the room connections. Reduced the amount of rooms to 32, will be plenty to explore and die :) Red lines show connections, if you see a full line before the other, it's the algorithm making a hole through rooms to connect start to finish.
Now is time for room generation!
So! I'm really happy, things are taking shape!
Let's generate a dungeon!
It feels like I have 10000 ants under my command to execute my orders. I love it.
End result.
What about exploring it? Let's go!
It's probably not made in a effective way, but hey, right now I'm more interested by the result than anything else. There is only one room type, so I don't have as much variety as I want, but that's to be made before the jam. Right now the objective is to make an ACTUAL GAME. So spawn some enemies, make arrows a finite resource, make possible to grab the arrows stuck in walls, put as much stuff as possible into the dungeon to make the exploration worthwhile.
From now on the game will grow as I put stuff in it and playtest, we'll see where it leads!
